Mid-year reviews are a common feature in workplaces around the world. Useful for evaluating and reflecting upon what’s happened over the last six months, and what they want to happen over the next six months, mid-year reviews give companies the chance to make adjustments to their actions that will keep them in line with their business goals.
In this post, we’re going to look at how you can take this concept and apply it to your personal life. Doing a personal mid-year review can help us stay conscious of our life balance. It also helps keep us on track with any personal goals or projects we want to focus on between now and the end of the year.
Looking Back
1. Make a list of everything that you feel proud of over the past six months.
Start by thinking about your experience of the last six months. Notice that this step doesn’t just involve results or things you’ve achieved, but focuses on how you feel about what you’ve done over the last half-year.
The things that you feel proud of can be of any nature or significance. Feeling proud of bringing in a big project for your company might sit on this list, alongside feeling proud of the fact that you’ve made it to the gym at least twice per week, or feeling proud of the fact that you’ve paid all your bills on time since the beginning of the year.
2. Make a list of any new goals or challenges you’ve taken on over the past six months, as well as how much progress you’ve made on each.
Many of us start the year with New Year’s Resolutions. You might find that these goals have changed over the past six months, or that the parameters have shifted. If a particular goal isn’t serving you and your long-term plans anymore (note: this is not the same as finding something challenging), this is a great time to make adjustments where necessary.
As well as looking at your goals individually, take a look at your personal life as a whole: are you feeling over-committed right now? Would you like to have more variety in your personal life?
Asking yourself questions like this now can help prevent you feeling overwhelmed or like you haven’t made the most of your year in six months’ time.
Looking Ahead
3. Identify two areas of your life you would like to focus on over the next six months.
Our lives can be broadly divided up into the following areas: family, leisure/fun, career, finance, relationships, health and fitness, physical environment, and personal development.
Go through each area and think about how satisfied you feel with this aspect of your life right now (it can be helpful to think about your satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10).
Once you’ve identified the two areas of your life you most want to focus on (usually these will be the two areas with the lowest satisfaction scores, but not always), write down three things you can do to bring your score in these areas closer to a 10/10.
4. Pick a word or phrase that will sum up your next six months.
This step might sound a little mystical, but it’s another way of helping you stay grounded between now and the end of the year.
Having a word or phrase that encapsulates how you’d like to experience your next six months helps remind you of the goals and intentions you’re setting now. As you might have experienced with goals you set at the beginning of the year, we can start off with the best intentions to honour those goals, only to have commitments and distractions throw us off course. Having a word or phrase that sums up how we want to experience the next six months helps keep us aligned with our original intentions and reduces the chance that we’ll get to the end of the year and regret how we spent our time.
Do you have any tips for a successful mid-year personal review? Leave a comment and let us know.
