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My Personal Mid-Year Checkin + Free Mid-Year Review Template

Today I want to share with you exactly how I do my first personal mid year checkin. Taking inspiration from my personal development role models.

My blog post will be filled with information and useful resources. Since you’ve been looking for a mid-year review you probably know its benefits. As a little reminder, I’ll write them down below again.

Why you should do a Mid-Year Checkin:

If you, like me, struggle with achieving your goals and kinda lose track of them in the middle of the year then a mid-year review will help you.

Reflection and Assessment: It allows you to pause and reflect on the progress you’ve made towards your goals since the beginning of the year. Are you on track or if adjustments are needed.
Course Correction: If you identify areas where you haven’t made as much progress as you’d hoped, a mid-year review provides an opportunity to course correct.
Recognition of Achievements: Celebrating your successes, both big and small, boosts morale and motivation. A mid-year review lets you acknowledge and appreciate the milestones you’ve reached so far, which can energize you for the rest of the year.
Alignment with Long-term Goals: It helps ensure that your daily activities and short-term goals are aligned with your broader, long-term aspirations. This alignment is crucial for maintaining focus and staying motivated throughout the year.
Improved Planning and Organization: Reviewing your progress halfway through the year allows you to better plan for the remainder of the year. You can set more realistic timelines and prioritize tasks based on current insights and circumstances.
Enhanced Accountability: Holding yourself accountable during a mid-year review encourages a sense of responsibility for your goals and commitments. It helps you stay disciplined and committed to achieving what you’ve set out to accomplish.

My Personal Mid-Year Review Process

In order to create my ideal Mid Year Review I took a look at my favorite self-development role models and their mid-year checkins/ annual reviews.

1. A Gratitude List

I took inspiration from Ali Abdaals’s annual review and started with a gratitude list. In the back of my mind I always think I haven’t done enough. But seeing all the things that I have actually accomplished I can’t help feeling proud and grateful. Here are a few things I am super grateful for:

As you can see since the birth of my little one business stuff has been put on the backburner.

Still, I am immensely grateful to be able to raise him and not go to work right after giving birth.

2. Mid Year Self Evaluation - 3 Key Questions

Next I used James Clear’s 3 Key questions that he answers in his annual reviews.I used Notion to write down my insights.

What went well this year?
What didn’t go so well this year?
What am I working toward?

1. What went well the last 6 months?

Family:

My little one is growing well and started walking. I have established a routine that works for us. I introduced him to a wide variety of veggies. We started potty training and it goes well. We managed to go to his Korean family once. I am super proud we handled the 12 hour flight so well. We joined two mommy-baby groups and he has been meeting a lot of other babies his age. Next half of the year I’d like to travel with him a little more. And we are surrounded by water, I want to take a baby swimming course with him. Therefore, I need to register a car.

Work:

It has been hard with baby to do much of anything. Alas I have finally started to work again while he sleeps. I finally fixed our internet problem. Created 3 Etsy products and started on this blog again. For the next half of the year I want to create regular posts again and regular emails to my newsletter.

Health:

Super proud that I manage to cook healthy foods for me and my baby almost every day. I started to workout again albeit irregularly and went from 63kg to 52,5kg. I lost all my pregnancy kilogramms. My belly still bothers me a bit. For the next half of the year I want to start a regular workout routine. (Also to be a role model for my baby)

Mindset:

I am a lot less of a perfectionist. I don’t make meter-long to-do lists and take the day more chill. When I have time to work I work, if not I don’t beat myself up for it. As long as I move forward I am proud.

2. What didn’t go so well:

Admin:

I am lagging behind in all of my admin tasks. From tax declarations to simple forms to fill out.

Writing:

Blogposts… I failed since I didn’t write and publish anything. I want to do it and will do it from now on. My articles will be here again.

Earning Money Online:

Also has been on the backburner. I want to be able to stay with my kids at home. I want to teach them and be by their side when they learn new things. I am proud to be a stay at home mum. I want to give my baby the best chances. So I need to make money remotely. Would you be interested on a serious, where I try to make an income online?

3. What am I working towards?

There are a lot of things I wish and work for in life. Here are 6 fundamental points that I want to achieve:

Freedom

I want to be financially free, and also free to be where I want to be when I want to be. I want to have the time and money to let my kids experience the world.

Routines and Processes

The best way to achieve things is to have routines and processes I can fall back to. I’ve realized that once something becomes a routine it’s a lot easier to follow through. No more procrastinating.

Health

I am a strong believer that health is the most important goal of all. If I had to choose money vs. health I’d always choose health. A good diet has always been something I’ve worked towards. I want to grow more of my own food. I want to do less stress-chocolate munching. (It’s one to two snacks a day at the moment) And working out… that has always been a hardship to me. It’s not immensely pleasurable for me and time with a baby is scarce. I want to at least work out 10 minutes 5 times a week. Or at least take a walk outside.

Being a good parent

I think as a parent I am a teacher, a role model and a carer. It’s my responsibility to show my kids they are loved. That regardless of what happens I am there to support them.

I also should introduce my baby to good routines. (Like eating, cleaning, playing, working out etc.) ( My baby made me realize how much I am lacking in that department). I want my kid to go out and experience life with all his senses. To make social connections.

Family

Without family, you are like a tree without strong roots.

Sharing

Finally I want to share what I learned. And I want to build meaningful connections. To learn from each other as a community.

3. Re-Evaluate Of Goals and Adjustments

1. Checking their Relevance:

I made a lot of goals for this year. A lot are just totally unrealistic with a baby. I checked my old goal plan and updated it. Like flipping my first website… I decided to just focus on the most relevant things and scratched a lot of stuff.

2. Set New Goals:

What are the 5 most important things you can do the next 180 days to move forward? Following Michael Hyatts quarterly review I created 5 business and 5 personal goals for the next 6 months.

4. Action Steps

This is the last part of this years Mid Year Checkin:

Break Down Goals: Divide each goal into smaller, actionable steps.
Prioritize Tasks: Identify which tasks are most important and prioritize them.
Set Deadlines: Assign deadlines to each task to stay on track.

Check our post on how to create an action plan here.

Tools And Resources You can Use for Your Mid Year Checkin:

Free Printable Mid Year Review Template

Productivity Apps

Notion: A versatile tool for organizing notes, goals, and tracking progress.
Trello: Great for visual task management and planning.
Habitica: Turns habit tracking into a game, making it more engaging.
Google Calendar: For scheduling check-ins and tracking deadlines.
Evernote: Useful for note-taking and organizing your review documents.

Youtube Videos On Mid Year Reviews

New Year Planning Lavendaire.
Ali Abdaal’s Annual Review.

This is it for this week. Please share your mid year or annual review in the comments bellow.

😊

I’d be super happy for that! If you haven’t made goals yet make sure to check out my post on goal setting.

My Personal Mid-Year Checkin + Free Mid-Year Review Template Read More »

How do Successful Women set Goals – Revealed

Project Girl 2 Woman

University teaches us how to set SMART Goals. Fairly sure 99% of you have heard about that method. Goals should be:

S specific
M measurable
A attainable
R realistic
T time-based

But how do successful people actually set goals? We’ll take a look:

Sara Blakely - Visualization

Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx swears by this method. When she was still selling fax machines, she envisioned herself being self-employed, selling a product to a lot of people and creating a business, which would fund itself even when she was not around. She said, you have to imagine every little detail.

In Her Book Self-Intelligence Jane Ransom Describes A Visualization Experiment:

Conducted in 1989 in this experiment college students were divided into three teams.

The students got tested on their dart-throwing abilities before and after an eight-week study. The first group, the control group, didn’t practice and didn’t visualize throwing darts. Their throwing abilities did not improve.
The second group physically practiced daily for 8 weeks.
And the third group altered between physically and mentally (visualization) practicing throwing darts. The third group improved the most!

“When you visualize you have to imagine all the body sensations”, Jane Ransom suggests. I found 2 simple visualization exercises:

1.1. Create a vision board.

A vision board does just what it says. It displays what you want and what your dreams are. Typically, it is a poster, or a cork board and you stick pictures and sentences of your dreams onto the board. Every time you look at it you get reminded of where you want to be.

1.2. Try this simple visualization technique

Find a place where you are comfortable, and you can relax.
Decide where you want to be or what you want to practice.
Set the scene. Where are you? Who is there? What does the place look like? What are you doing? What are you feeling? Which sensations do you feel? What do you hear? What do you smell? Imagine the scene as vividly as possible.
Now practice the action you want to perform.
Imagine how you succeed in the action and how it makes you feel. Proud? Delighted? Happy?

Oprah - Manifestation & Skill Up

Oprah believes in Manifestation. Here is how it works:

1. You have to want something.

2. You have to imagine how your life is like when you have it.

3. You have to believe it’ll happen.

4. Then let it go and move in the direction of working toward it.

Skill Up

She recommends to become so amazing at something that your talent and skill can’t be dismissed and do not compare yourself to others. Here is a post on how to achieve your goals on Oprah.com.

Kylie jenner - Do Something You Love

Do something you love and that you are passionate about so you’ll have something that makes you happy every day.

Carreergirldaily did a great job on showing, which business tricks we can learn from Kylie Jenner.

Set Your Goals Today -With the Digital Goal Planning Workbook!

Candice Oneida - Dream Big

Instead of setting goals you should set dreams, Kaeina Cave recommends. The 22-year old girl already has a minor planet named after her after developing a method for finding nano toxins that form in seawater after oil spills. If people don’t laugh at your dreams, they aren’t big enough.

Heidi Grant Halvorso - Decide when and where you will take action

Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently recommends that you know exactly when and where you take action. Your brain will be prepared to take action. Plan and schedule your action

steps. According to studies it increases your chances of success by up to 300%.

Lisa Nichols - Chunk Big Goals into Smaller Goals

Lisa Nichols cuts down big goals into smaller 90-day goals. You should be able to measure your actions, goals and milestones.

Write Your Goals Down

A study by psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews confirms the assumption that writing goals down makes them more achievable. She did a study on 267 people. She separated them into 5 groups and each group had to think about their goals. People who wrote down their goals were more likely to achieve them. People from group 5, which had a whooping 76% success rate wrote down their goals, created actionable steps, held themselves accountable through friends and created a weekly progress report.

Write down your goal along with us daily. Post it down in the comments if you want or message us we will ask you in a few days if you are still on track! Or share it with us on Pinterest. Create an action plan for your next 10 steps and create a progress report, which you will share with a friend or family member. (PS.: Don’t share it with a negative person. Instead, look for a supportive friend)

What else to Read:

How do Successful Women set Goals – Revealed Read More »

How to create an Action Plan + Free Template

Project Girl 2 Woman

Let’s jump right into creating an action plan for your personal goals.

(Sorry I am not really good at small talk. Ups.)

What is an Action Plan?

An action plan is a must have document for all goal achievers. You can create one in paperform or as a digital plan. It helps you plan all your tasks to achieve your goals. It is a very powerful project management tool.

A Simple Action Plan Definition:

An action plan is a step-by-step guide to help you achieve your goals. A personal plan of action is a simple way to break down what you want to accomplish into small steps. You’ll know exactly where you’re going.

Contents of an Action Plan

A clearly defined goal.
In-depth actionable tasks relevant to your goal.
A clear timeline, with milestones and deadlines.
It needs to show who is responsible for what.
Which resources do you have/ need?
You need to be able to check your progress.

Benefits of a Plan of Action

Especially if you have many tasks on hand and don’t know where to start, it is easy to get overwhelmed and procrastinate. The creation of an action plan helps you cut down your bigger task into smaller tasks: You’ll be able to:

work more efficiently
overcome procrastination
know your exact next steps
see how far you’ve come
fewer missed deadlines
less preassure

3 Questions You need to ask Yourself when Creating an Action Plan:

Who?

How many people are involved and what are their roles?

When?

When does the action plan start and end? And when are specific deadlines?

What?

What tasks are needed to accomplish your goals?

How to create an Action Plan:

Creating an action plan doesn’t have to be difficult. We’ll show you step by step how you can make your own personal plan.

Step 1: Set a goal

The first step is to set a goal you want to achieve by the end of the term. If you have no goal in mind yet, I recommend you to make a brain dump and write down everything that comes to your mind. What is the most important one you want to achieve?

If you already have your goal set, you are ready to get started. Just before we head to the next step I’d like you to rewrite the goal you set. I want you to adjust it, so that it is a SMART goal if you haven’t done so yet.

So what are the categories of a SMART goal?

Specific: Is your goal specific? Don’t just say you want to grow your Instagram followers by the next month. Add a number you are striving for! For example you have 500 followers and you want to grow 50% by next month which means you are aiming for 750 followers or additional 250 followers.

Measurable: how do you measure the progress to achieve your objective? Is it the monthly page views of your blog? Or the amount of products sold? Maybe even the chapters learned for your language course?

Achievable: Is it doable with your resources and the skills you have? It doesn’t sound achievable if you want to program an app within 3 weeks but have no programming skills or the finances to hire a programmer. Of course, you could still learn programming but you have to set a fitting deadline then.

Realistic: Is it realistic? 1 million youtube subscriptions in a month doesn’t sound realistic! But reaching a significantly lower number is! For example if you take 500 followers instead of 1 million. (Building your dream life can take time: most people are not an overnight success, never give up and one day you will get there!)

Timely: What’s the start and end date? What is the deadline? If you cannot assess how much time you would need to achieve your goal you can always look for experience reports. Not only will they help you estimate a proper time span but they also can help you find changes and tasks required to hit your goals even faster.

With a smart goal as basis you can create a smart action plan!

Step 2: Divide your goal into small actionable steps

Time to break your smart goal into tiny actionable tasks. Take a paper and brainstorm all tasks neccessary for achieving your goal.

Don’t worry if you need to do more research or you aren’t sure about certain steps. Write those unclear points down as well. You can tackle them along the way. A plan is always adaptable.

Step 3: Prioritize and add Deadlines

Having all your top points in front of you, it is time to find the most important/ urgent one and the least important / urgent one. Which tasks need to be accomplished before you can start the next step?

At the end you should have your steps organized. You can use a Gantt Chart to visualize the timeline or you use our action plan template below.

Step 4: Add Resources and Budget

Next step is to add resources and the budget needed to fulfill each task. For example, if you plan to create a blog and want it to be hosted you have to pay a specific amount based on your web hosting service company. If you want to create your own furniture, you need materials, knowhow and maybe a mode of transportation. During this step it is useful to look up several alternatives and find the best one fitting to your resources and finances. Enter your choice in the document.

Step 5: Monitor your progress

Once everything is clear and you have completed your document it is time to start taking actions. While you work from one task to another and hit your deadlines, it is also important to monitor your progress. Do you meet the deadlines? Did you do the correct task? Are you still on track? Is there something you have left out and still need to fit in?

Action Plans for Groups:

If you have more people involved in your action plan it is important to make the plan clear. You need to exactly write down which person does which task at which point of time. Additionally, you always need a good communication system and give important information to your team members. Miscommunication can make your progress slow down or even completely miss your objective. Also, a lack of communication can cause friction between team members .

Action Plan Template Excel: Click on it to create your own Action Plan!

Last but not least I want to add the 3 criteria for a good action plan by the community tool box:

The plan needs to be complete
Tasks need to be clear
The “action plan needs to reflect the current work”

Now it’s time for you to create your own plan of action. Want us to improve the template? Tell us what you wish we’d include in the comments 🙂

Time to achieve your life goals.

What to read next?

Here is our Ultimate Post on Goal Setting
Need some Focus Tips Cause you are Overwhelmed?
If you don’t know how to prioritize your tasks check the 80/20 Rule.
Are you lacking motivation? Here are Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivators you wish you’d tried sooner.
Struggling with Self-Discipline? Check out our tips.
Here are some tips if you are a Procrastinator and need a little push.

If you want to get informed about the latest updates, please subscribe to our newsletter. Last but not least we update every Wednesday and every Saturday. So, it would be great to see you again. Also, for updates follow us on:

Love from Germany,

Carina and Julia

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