How to Conduct a Mid-Year Self-Review

A mid-year review is a chance to step back and take notes of the hits, misses, and learning from the past 6 months and plan how many milestones you need to take in front of you.

A review will not only help you uncover insights and set better goals for the rest of the year, but it can also help you change your perspective on many things.

According to the peak-end rule, our memory of an entire season is largely determined by how we feel at its peak and end. This means that reflecting on your accomplishments for a certain season can rewire your memory of that season as great or rather positive.

For a great review;

You want to start by noticing your accomplishments.

Ask yourself, what went well? You want to start by focusing on the positive. Which milestones have you achieved?

When you do that, you build self-efficacy – you become more confident in your abilities to set goals and achieve them. You realize the small wins you have had. The small wins give you a winner effect that enables you to achieve more goals.

The winner effect is what makes you dominant in situations. You may not have achieved the big goal yet but you may have achieved an alternative goal, realize that goals change with the situation. If you are fighting to get your kid to an Ivy League university and that doesn’t work, you may have got them into one of the 25 major business universities or so, that is still dominant. The goal was to get them into the best possible institution with a good pre-selection. Don’t be so stuck on a specific goal, rigidity is not dominance.

The second part is looking at what hasn’t gone so well

We all have limitations as humans and wildcards that pop up and interfere with our plans. These are unforeseen circumstances that we couldn’t control.

Reflecting on what didn’t work doesn’t have to be a frustrating event. Understanding what worked and why it worked can help you change tactics and make things work for the better.

These are growing pains and unfortunate trade-offs that you went through.

How do you feel about what didn’t work and what can you do about it? Is it something you need to work on and how much of an impact does it have on the rest of your goals?

If you want to lose some weight and progress has been slow. Maybe you might need to be more strict on your diet or even change the trainer.

Create some hard rules. If you want to stop drinking soda and eating burgers and pizzas yet can’t resist the urge, simply don’t have them in the fridge.

If you want to improve and have better grades. You might need to have better study habits or look for the best instructors or pay for extra tuition.

What have you learned so far? 

The third step in conducting a mid-year review is putting down what you learned about yourself in the past 6 months.

If you felt good about making some strides in one area but feel bad about how much it took from the other areas of your life, then you might want to have a balance.

Success at the end of the day is when you can balance different aspects of your life.

You can achieve in business, as a mum and as a friend to other people.

What is your goal for the remaining part of the year?

Knowing how much ground do you need to be covered and where do you need to focus your energy is important? If it is health, then it becomes one of your priorities.

If it is travel, then you can start planning for some trips not so far away.

Using the lessons learned from the accomplishments and setbacks so far, you can now take action to improve on the remaining part of the year and make it a success. Look unto the future.