Fall is here, and now is the perfect time to revisit your goals and get back on track if you’ve fallen off. With this post, I am going to share what I am doing to tackle my personal and business goals in what I am calling my Fall reset.
My motives for doing a fall reset
Early this year, I set goals for my personal and business life, and I was doing pretty well with executing on some new projects. (In a future post, I plan to discuss the specific things I did to make progress on my goals and what was working for me at the time.) I started this blog and I revived my podcast. Then I stopped. I stopped posting, I stopped working on my business. Maybe you can relate. There are periods of time, especially at the beginning of the year, where you feel bursts of motivation and then something happens, or you lose steam or focus and you fall behind. Well, I’ve decided that this Fall would be the perfect time to try again. My desires to accomplish these things aren’t going anywhere so I mind as well dust myself off and recommit. If this post resonates with you, I hope you can take the tips discussed and apply them to your own productivity journey.
Forgiving yourself for slowing down
In order to move forward, the first thing we will need to do is forgive ourselves for putting our goals on the back burner. This may seem a little fluffy or unnecessary, but failing to take the time to acknowledge that you may be holding a grudge against yourself could be what keeps you from recovering. I had to realize that I fell into a pattern that made it difficult to just pick up where I left off. It felt like starting over, and that seemed even more intimidating and stressful than I initially realized. I also realized that the fact that I stopped, contributed to self-doubt, leading to questioning my capabilities. If you’ve been avoiding trying again, it could be because your mind is trying to protect you from the feeling of being disappointed in yourself.
To overcome this, you will need to give yourself another chance. Acknowledge that you fell short of the promises you made yourself, and choose to build the kind of relationship with yourself that you would have with a valued loved one who makes a mistake. Choose to move forward and try again with the mindset that you are worth it, and you deserve the opportunity to redeem yourself.
The mindset shifts needed for a reset
To move forward with this reset, we will need to make a few more mindset adjustments to take us from self-doubt and overwhelm to focused, intentional and recommitted.
Your goals and your future are worth trying again
First, you will need to adopt the mindset that achieving your goals is absolutely worth the effort it takes to make another attempt. To begin to reprioritize your goals, you will need to see them and your future as deserving of the effort. This will mean becoming enthusiastic about your future outcomes in ways that you may not have been before. Identifying the real reasons you are working towards your goals in the first place and the true value of having the things you want in your life is what will fuel you to move forward even when it is challenging to do so. Make it obvious to yourself how your accomplished goals will positively impact your life and the lives of those around you. How will you and others benefit from the work you are doing now? Once you begin to see your future as worthy of the effort, it will become a lot easier to make the sacrifices necessary today to get to those outcomes.
Prioritize deciding to live without regret
What if you knew time passing would not make you want to accomplish your goals any less? What would you do if you were confident that the desire to have the thing (whatever it is for you) would never go away, but instead it would intensify? How long would you work on it then? How many times would you try again to make it work, even after a period of slow growth or progress? If you knew no matter what that the desire would stick with you, you would be less likely to try to ignore it. You would also feel less reluctant to invest the time into trying to make it happen. You would be more likely to give it another shot after a long period of putting it off. Why not? Why not try again if you knew you would continue to spend time thinking about it? Furthermore, your desire for the thing without taking action would just turn into regret. Instead of the desire going away, you’d end up wishing you had invested the time sooner so you could be experiencing the results now.
Let’s prioritize living without regret. Let’s focus on making decisions that acknowledge the reality that our desires have not changed in all this time and are unlikely to in the future.
Times and circumstances are changing, take advantage of the moment
Depending on what you want, it may become even more important for you to have it in the future, and time passing may only make it more challenging for you to get it. For example, if your goal is financial freedom or independence, that only becomes more relevant and necessary as you age. As we know, things are only getting more expensive and depending on what you do for income now, it may become more difficult, or you may lose the desire to do it as you get older.
Times are changing and right now you have a unique set of circumstances that may not be perfect, but they may be enough to get you to your next best step or outcome. It is easy to take for granted what you have now and forget that it may be just what you need to move forward. What decisions would you make now if you thought that circumstances would change in a way that made it more difficult for you later? You may be more likely to take advantage of what you have now if you thought you would be in a more difficult situation or have more obstacles later.
Let’s use whatever resources we have now to the best of our abilities. You never know what may happen or what could change. The last thing we want is to have the same goals but new and intensified problems.
If we keep in mind that the future we are hoping for is worth the sacrifice today, we can create the motivation we need to delay gratification and progress toward our goals.
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