Here we are, day number six. So impressed I haven’t given up yet. What I want to talk about tonight is your midyear check in. So we’re in June, and for all intents and purposes, I probably should have done this on the 15th of June, being the half way mark, but hey, I’m a few days late.
Charlie, what do you want? Every time I talk, the dog wants to come in. This is Charlie, everybody. Everybody say, “Hi, Charlie. Hi.” She’s very cute, and she’s a Labrador, so hey, we love her. 40 kilos of chocolate lab.
Anyway, back to our midyear check in. So every year at about the six month mark, I sit down and look at where I am in business and in life. So, I generally try to work with three to five goals at a time, no more, otherwise, you get kind of bamboozled. So I’ll sit down and go, “Okay, I start here.”
She doesn’t bark. It’s perfect, but she still thinks she’s a puppy, so she jumps up on you. Anyway, back to what I’m talking about.
So at the beginning of the year, you kind of set these goals in various areas of your life, as I said, three to five of them, and by the time we get to June, chances are, you’ve gone off the beaten track on one or all of them, or changed you mind completely, never looked at them again, and maybe you’re just flustered, or maybe you achieved them and you actually need to set yourself another goal.
So the six month mark, it’s like a kind of, I don’t know, New Year’s Eve reset, I guess. I sit down, and I look at the goals that I had started for the year. I look at where I’ve progressed on each of those goals, why I haven’t progressed as far as I wanted to get to, and what I need to do to maybe pivot to get where I want to get to on that goal, or if I actually just need to go, “No, that goal’s just not my goal. I’m done with it. Put it to bed, start on something else.”
The next thing I look at when I do midyear reset is my actual vision for the year. So, every year, I have a word for the year, and I have a bit of a vision of what I want it to look like and feel like. And I don’t know if you’re read The Desire Map, or you do a word of the year, all of those kind of things give you a feeling for what you’re doing for the year. So I have a word every year, and I look at my diary, and go, “Oh, well.” I’m not feeling, I’m not embodying that word, for example. And my vision for this year is quite strick, but I’ve been deviated by a lot of things, so I need to pull back into my vision for the year.
The next thing I do is actually look at my wheel of life exercise. So I do one of these on my website if you are interested in having a look at it. You may have actually done a wheel of life exercise. I don’t know. They’re really, really, really good. I look at finances, business and career, physical environment, fun and recreation, personal growth, romance, or sex, whatever the case may be, family and friends, and health. Now, for me, learning’s a really big thing this year, and I have that in my personal growth section.
So, the beginning of the year, I did my wheel of the life, and it was pretty lopsided, like there’s nowhere that bike was going to roll, not that I ride bikes, but you get the metaphor. So, at the six month mark, which I actually did a couple of days ago, I looked at it, and I am a little bit more aligned in some areas, but other areas, I’ve actually dropped back in.
At the beginning of the year, for example, my health, I was way on track. It was fantastic. Hadn’t had booze for three months, I was going to the gym every day. Okay, I’ve got the winter, I want chocolates, but I’m back to the no booze, and I am doing a bit better on that. So I’ve looked at that and gone, “What do I need to concentrate on in order to get this six months back on track?” Because I can be a determined son of a bitch if I want to be.
The next thing I do is actually diary audit. Now, I should have actually brought my diary to show you. So I’m pretty fanatical about writing things in a physical diary, because I like having that thing to kind of cross out, and I’ve done that, or ticked that, or put a pretty color around the fact that I’m going to Hugh Jackman with Elliott. Hi, gorgeous. So that’s a pretty exciting one, and I also use my iCal. Now, my iCal, I’m not going to show you because you’ll probably think I’m a wanker, my iCal is very, very, very color coordinated, and it’s timed to within an inch of its life.
So, I generally get up at 5:00 a.m. I find I’ve always been an early bird. When I was in high school, I would literally get up at 5:00 or 5:30 and do my homework, because I’d had rehearsals the night before, or I was tired, and at some points, my mom had this muffin company, and we had this commercial kitchen at home, so there’d always be the smell of muffins.
And the alarm would go off at 5:00, and I’d come downstairs to this wafting smell of muffins and these beautiful, beautiful muffins, and then, that radio, I think it was two GB. It would be the beep, beep, beep on the hour. Just the most vivid memory to me of my childhood, and trying to do homework in high school.
But I’ll look at my diary, sorry to get sidetracked, and my iCal, and go, “Well,” it’s all colored, and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, I’m spending so much time on X color,” which might be social. “No wonder my studies have fallen down the beaten track.” So I need to get those colors back in line with my wheel of life. Now, I am a pretty visual person, so for me, those kind of things work.
For you, there might be other things that you need to do at your six month mark. Like you could call your gym, and find out… If you think you’ve been to the gym three times a week all year, you know you can actually call them and go, “Okay, can I find out how many times I’ve been?” And they’re going to say, “Oh, dude, you’ve been twice in a month.” So we bought it ourselves. We think we’re doing certain things. We might think we’ve read 10 chapters in a book, and we’ve actually only read one because we keep falling asleep. We might think we have saved $1,000.00 in an ING account for our Christmas spending, when, oh shit, the gas bill came in and we actually took that $1,000.00 back out and spent it. Should I get an ING account? Memo to self.
So I think it’s really important to do this six monthly audit, and look at where you are in your life. Look at where you want to be in December. If you want to be doing…
Oh, you’re going on a weight loss adventure. That’s exciting. Let me know what you’re doing. It’s a tough one, Vicky. I have been up and down with my weight entire life, entire life. I’m feeling pretty good about my weight at the moment, but it’s a head thing. I was at Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers, I can’t remember which one was first, at 12. So up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, and once it started being a battle, I don’t know. They say it’s always a battle, but I do hope I can get that off though, stop that being on my life board. Yeah, anyway, this one’s not about the size of my butt.
But it’s so important and it’s not too late. It’s like we have this… I talked about it the other day when I was talking about procrastination, that we think we’ve got to do something on the first of the year, or we have to do it on the first of the month, or I’ll start after this party, or I’ll start in a six week lead up to bikini season, and it’s just bullshit. Just start tomorrow.
I can encourage you all to sit down tonight, and if you want my wheel of life exercise, just shoot me a message and I’ll message it to you. It’ll take you a half an hour to sit down and go, “Okay, this is what my life’s looking like now. I want it to get to that. So in this next six months, what do I need to commit to in order to make that happen?” And you’re the only one that can actually commit to it. There’s no book that’s going to help you get there, there’s no exercise that’s going to make you get there. It’s action that’s going… No friend’s going to help you get there.
It’s action that you need to take, action, action, action, action, action and implementation, and what I’m really learning is consistency, and I haven’t been great at that. In fact, I’m pretty crap at consistency, but I’m good at other things though. We’ll go with that. So it’s consistency, action, and the consistency of that action will help you bring in this next six months, but you can’t do that if you don’t know where you’re actually going.
So I really encourage you to go back, and if you didn’t do anything at the beginning of the year, it’s not too late. Start now. You’ve got, how many days, 182 days or something to the end of the year. 185? I can’t remember, but it’s not too late to actually get stuff done.
So thank you for watching, and happy Friday, and if you need to know anything more about your six month check in or setting goals or any of the other stuff I do, just shoot me a message or go onto SamanthaLeith.com, and if you join me in the newsletter there, you’ll get a bit of an inspiration in your email box every week.
Okay, have a good night. Bye. Lots of love to you.