It’s Time for a Mid-Year Reset
It’s that time of year again – time for a mid-year reset. I absolutely love the idea of a mid-year reset because we’re halfway through the year. If you’re anything like me, you started January 1st with huge goals and plans. However, life inevitably gets in the way, things shift, and you might find yourself off track. Now, as we approach the halfway point of the year, it’s a fantastic opportunity to realign, re-strategize your goals, and reset your plan.
Why a Mid-Year Reset is Essential
If you didn’t set goals at the start of the year, don’t worry – that’s totally okay. The transition into the new year can be incredibly busy. Often, we have the best of intentions to set goals, but if it doesn’t happen in January or by February, we feel like we need to wait until next year. That’s simply not true! This mid-year halfway point is a perfect chance to clarify the goals you want to achieve, make a plan, and organize your life to support those plans.
Don’t Have Goals Yet? No Problem!
Full disclosure: this post isn’t going to dive into the specifics of goal setting and planning. If you haven’t set your goals yet but want to follow my process, I recommend purchasing my You Got Goals Planner and workshop series. As a special treat, use the code 2024RESET at checkout to get 50% OFF. This will help you set the right goals now to carry you through to the end of the year!
The Power of a Mid-Year Reset
My approach to a mid-year reset is inspired by an amazing quote I heard years ago: “Six months of hardcore focus and alignment can put you five years ahead in life.” I truly believe this is true. If you can get clear on your goals, align your life with them, and put in the work, you can achieve in a matter of months what most people take years to accomplish.
The Four Stages of a Mid-Year Reset
This guided mid-year reset activity consists of four stages. For each stage, I’ll share some thoughts and specific activities for you to work through. I recommend setting aside at least one hour to complete this process in one sitting. Once you get the ball rolling, you’ll build momentum that will help you complete it sooner. When we break things into smaller pieces, we often either don’t finish the process or it takes much longer than it needs to.
Make sure to grab your goal materials and plans for the year, plus extra space to write and go through the activities – a notebook or a notes app will work just fine.
The four stages we’ll work through are:
- Goal Reset
- Vision Board Reset
- Goal Life Realignment
- Goal Life Organization and Reset
Phase One: Goal Reset
In this phase, we’ll take a close look at our annual goals and the plans we’ve made so far. This step is crucial to ensure we are moving forward with the goals that truly matter to us.
Activity: Reviewing Your Goals
Start by reviewing your list of goals for the year. For each goal, complete the following prompts:
- Assess Progress:
- What progress have I made on this goal so far?
- What is left for me to do in order to accomplish it?
- Identify Obstacles:
- If no progress has been made, what obstacles have stopped me from taking action?
- Is this still something worth prioritizing this year?
- Commit to Goals:
- Which goals am I committed to pursuing for the next six months?
- What objectives do I need to achieve to complete them?
From here, assign 1-3 objectives to each remaining month of the year. This will act as the outline for your monthly planning.
Understanding Objectives
If you’re not familiar with my goal-setting terminology, an objective is the action plan for how you will achieve a goal. If the goal itself is what you want, the objective is how you will make it happen. Objectives take one of three forms:
- Project Plan: A series of steps that you complete to get your desired outcome.
- System: Similar to a project plan, but instead of working through the process once, systems are repeated on a recurring basis.
- Habit: A single action you take on some recurring frequency.
For each goal you decide to move forward with over the next six months, you may have a number of different objectives to accomplish it. Take all those objectives and assign 1-3 per month of the year. Some objectives, like systems or habits, may need to be assigned to more than one month and that is perfectly fine.
Moving Forward
Once you know which goals you are committed to pursuing for the rest of the year, you can move on to Phase Two: The Vision Board Reset.
Phase Two: The Vision Board Reset
Creating a vision board for my goals has been an essential part of my process for years. Here’s why: when we can see the things we desire over and over, it not only reminds us of what we are working towards but also helps us get into the energy of that desire. It activates our creativity, our problem-solving abilities, and regulates our nervous system around the idea of trying new things to get new results.
I like to use the mid-year reset as a time to get back into the excitement of my goals by creating a new vision board. Whether or not my goals list has changed, it’s just nice to freshen things up and bring in a new excitement and energy around our goals.
How to Create Your Vision Board
- Envision Your Goals:
- Take each of your goals one by one and think about what you envision for this goal.
- What would it look like for you to live in the reality where you have achieved it?
- Search for Images:
- Use Pinterest or other online resources to find images that resonate with your vision.
- Save the images to your computer.
- Create Your Vision Board:
- Make two versions of your vision board: one landscape orientation for your computer and iPad background, and one portrait orientation for your phone and planner.
- Use tools like Photoshop or Canva to create your vision boards. Alternatively, you can print your images and create a physical collage.
Tips for an Effective Vision Board
- Get Clear on Your Future: Ensure the images reflect the future you envision when you achieve each goal.
- Choose Inspiring Images: Pick images that seriously inspire you.
- Avoid Faces That Don’t Look Like You: To maintain relatability, either choose images with no faces or blur out the faces.
- Create Multiple Versions: Having different versions for various devices and places ensures you see your vision board frequently.
With your new vision board created, it’s time to move on to Phase Three: The Goal/Life Realignment.
Phase Three: The Goal/Life Realignment
In this phase, you will identify the habits you need to put in place to support your goals and create your ideal weekly and daily schedules to make room for each of your goals, ensuring dedicated time and space to work on them.
Habits for Goal Achievement
There is a quote attributed to Aristotle that I love: “You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.” When it comes to achieving your goals, they are not just tasks you experience once; you need to develop the right habits that make your goals a consistent part of your life.
For each of your goals, get clear on which habits will help you achieve them and make them a permanent part of your life.
Additionally, I recommend incorporating the following seven success habits, which I call the Self-Mastery Seven. These are daily habits for success, and while you don’t need to do each one every single day, your life and goal achievement will benefit from doing them most days of the week.
- Mindset Work: Engage in activities like visualization, affirmations, journaling, or meditation. You don’t need to do all of them daily, but doing one of these most days of the week will improve your mindset, which plays a major role in achieving any goal.
- Movement: Aim for 150 minutes of zone 2 cardio a week, which translates to 30 minutes, five days a week, of a workout at roughly 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. This has significant science-backed benefits for managing your wellness and personal energy.
- Planning: Consistently plan before taking major action. Setting your top three priorities and scheduling your day will make you more focused and productive.
- Cooking: Prepare and eat home-cooked meals most of the time, as they are generally more nutritious and cost-effective.
- Learning: Engage in continuous learning through reading, taking courses, watching instructional videos, or listening to educational podcasts.
- Connection: Reach out and talk to people, develop intimate relationships, and share your innermost thoughts and feelings with trusted individuals. This significantly helps in reducing stress.
- Sleep: Prioritize getting a good night’s sleep. Protect your sleep like it’s the most important thing you can do each day, as it truly is. Most people are sleep-deprived, which has the same effect as being drunk. Better sleep is crucial for every area of your life.
FREE DOWNLOAD: Self-Master Seven – Daily Success Habits Planner Card!
Creating Your Ideal Weekly Schedule
Next, let’s talk about creating your ideal or default weekly schedule.
If you’ve never heard me discuss the default weekly schedule, it is the master outline for what I do across an average week. Whether you realize it or not, you likely already have a loose weekly routine because we all fall into patterns. Taking control of this weekly routine allows you to create an intentional schedule that gives you time and space for everything that matters in your life.
While it’s true there aren’t enough hours in a day to fit everything, when we zoom out to the week, we have 168 hours to play with. To utilize your week strategically, think about the major categories of tasks you do—for work, home, personal goals, etc.—and time-block them across your week.
- Morning Routine: Include your mindset work and daily self-care.
- Recurring Tasks: Set aside time blocks for your grocery run, meal planning, and meal prep.
- Workouts: Schedule your exercise sessions.
- Connections: Allocate time for one-on-one interactions.
- Rest: Include rest periods.
- Life Essentials and Goals: Dedicate time blocks for life essentials and deep work on your goals.
Creating a themed workweek can be helpful, whether you work for yourself or in a job where your tasks vary. A default template for when you work on each category of tasks helps you stay focused and achieve better results.
Use this template as the skeleton of your plan when planning your weeks. Batch tasks and leave room for white space, so if something unexpected comes up, you have time for it without ruining your plans.
Creating Your Ideal Daily Schedule
Just like the default weekly schedule, you should have a version of your ideal day, noting when you will do certain habits or essentials. Since many activities are done daily or most days, set aside time in your daily routine for them.
Only schedule habits into your daily routine if it’s something you should do most days. Think about adding time for the Self-Mastery Seven mentioned earlier. Once you have this ideal daily routine, it becomes the template for how you move through your day. While it won’t always be 100% accurate, and some days will require adjustments, having this template will help you establish strong routines that make you a more organized and successful person.
Once you know what habits you need to work on, you can start adding those habits to your existing routines and create this time-blocked default weekly schedule to work from.
Phase Four: Goal/Life Organization
Now it’s time to get to the fourth and final phase of this mid-year reset process: Goal/Life Organization!
In this phase, we will cover what needs to get organized in your life to support the achievement of your goals. We’ll look at how your environment is currently set up and how it may already be supporting or perhaps hindering your goals. When I say environment, I mean three things: your physical environment (home, office, spaces where you live and work), the people in your environment who are impacting and influencing you, and your mindset (self-talk and limiting beliefs).
The way I see it is this: there is a reason you don’t have your goal yet—it’s because your environment isn’t optimal for you to take action. It doesn’t make it easy and stress-free for you to show up and live your life. So we need to ask ourselves some hard questions to see what needs to change so we have an environment conducive to achieving our goals!
Evaluating Your Current Environment
First, evaluate how your current environment either supports or hinders your goals. Look at your physical environment, the people in your life, and your mindset. What is working and what is not? Identify elements of support in each area and areas of hindrance that need to be fixed.
With that brain dump of ideas out of your head, let’s start getting more specific. Which areas of your home, office, or other personal spaces need organizing or optimization to bring you into alignment with your goals and ideal life?
Optimizing Your Physical Environment
One strategy I recommend for everyone is to get a handle on your wardrobe by choosing a Daily Uniform Template. Then, organize your closet so that your uniform is prioritized and the excess you don’t wear is moved or decluttered. Getting dressed in the morning is one of the most stressful points of the day for a woman. Research shows women are stressed out in the morning trying to choose what to wear, even with closets filled with clothes. A Daily Uniform Template solves this. It’s essentially deciding on a formula for dressing that works with your body shape, personal style, and the formality you dress for daily.
For example, my template for summer is a tank top, linen button-down, and linen pants or shorts. In the winter, I wear wool joggers and cashmere sweaters. Knowing this, I have cleared out clothes I don’t wear, pieces that don’t fit this template, or can’t easily be integrated with it, and streamlined my closet. This makes it quick and easy for me to get ready in the morning, and I know it will make it easier for you as well!
Beyond the closet, think about what you need to change in your physical environment to get the most from your space. Do you need to better organize files in your office? Reorganize the closet in the spare bedroom? Find a better storage solution for your towels in your bathroom? Identify the areas that need to be addressed. Some issues may have simple solutions like purchasing an organizational tool, but others may be projects requiring time to reorganize a space. These changes won’t happen overnight, but clearly identifying them means you can schedule time over the next few weeks to address them.
Evaluating the People in Your Life
Next, think about the people in your life. There is a quote I love that says, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you are trying to hit specific goals, you need to surround yourself with people who have also hit those goals or at least people with goals they are also going after.
On the flip side, if you have people in your life who are negative, unsupportive, or just not on a journey for personal growth, you may need to set boundaries with them, especially if they drain your time and energy more than necessary.
Ask yourself who in your life is bringing you stress and draining your energy. Take steps to set limits with them and protect your energy, so you have more energy for your goals and for interacting with like-minded individuals who are also working on their goals and dream life.
Sometimes, finding people on a similar journey is difficult, which is why I have the Charmed Life Master Mind where women in my community can learn, find accountability, and get coaching together to help them achieve their goals and create their best lives.
Improving Your Self-Talk
Finally, let’s address your self-talk. The way you speak to yourself is a major factor in your success. You are either your greatest hype person or your biggest critic. Your words and thoughts can motivate you into action or spiral you out of control. We need to get our self-talk to a more positive place by identifying the limiting beliefs we need to replace.
When you think about your goals, what limits do you see to your potential? A good way to identify limiting beliefs is to ask yourself why your goal might not work out. The answers will reveal the beliefs you need to face and replace. For each limiting belief, find some evidence or an affirmation that challenges the negative belief.
Here are a few examples:
- Limiting Belief: I can’t get healthy; my whole family is out of shape.
- Evidence: There are so many people who came from unhealthy families who made a change and ended up inspiring their families as well!
- Limiting Belief: I can’t start a business; this niche is already too saturated.
- Evidence: A saturated niche means plenty of business opportunity if I show up in a unique way.
- Limiting Belief: I’m in my 40s and still not married; I’ll be single forever.
- Evidence: People get married and divorced at every age; the right person for me is out there somewhere, also looking for me.
Once you have this evidence or affirmations, use them with your mindset work scheduled as part of the Self-Mastery Seven Success Habits!
Watch the Mid-Year Reset Video
Congratulations!
Once you have worked through this process, you have completed your Mid-Year Reset! You now have a clear vision for the next six months, a fresh vision board, realigned goals and life, key habits identified, template weekly and daily schedules in place, and a plan to organize your environment for success. Well done!
Join the Charmed Life Master Mind!
If you loved this post, gained valuable insights, and wish for more resources to help you plan and organize your life around achieving your goals, you belong inside the Charmed Life Master Mind!
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What You’ll Get in the Master Mind
- Live Classes & On-Demand Tools: Access a mix of live classes and on-demand tools to enhance your planning and productivity skills.
- Community Support: Join a supportive community where you can find inspiration, solutions, and coaching from me and other like-minded women.
- Daily Inspiration & Coaching: Get daily inspiration and coaching as needed to keep you motivated and on track.
Why Join?
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you lack growth-minded people in your life right now, the Charmed Life Master Mind can be the community you need. Share your journey, struggles, and celebrate your wins with people who also want the best for you—including me! I’ll be there to mentor and coach you as often as you need it.
Remember, six months of hardcore focus and alignment can put you five years ahead in life. Massively up-level your life this year by joining the Charmed Life Master Mind and getting the support and tools you need to make a quantum leap with your goals!
xoxo,
