208 | The Mid-Year Checkpoint

We’re almost halfway through the year. How are things looking with your goals for the year?

If you’re not sure, now is a great time to check in with your progress on your goals and make sure you’re on track.

In this episode, let’s walk through some questions to help you assess your progress on your goals, get back on track if you need to, and finish the year strong.

• • the importance of checking in with your goals throughout the year

  • 4 questions to assess your progress on your goals

  • the importance of setting goals

  • the control you have over your finances

  • goals as a guidepost

Learn more about The Wealthyesq Group Coaching Program

You’re listening to Wealthyesq. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today we are doing a mid-year check-in on your finances. We’re almost halfway through the year, and the middle of the year is a great checkpoint to review and reflect on your goals and reset if necessary to finish the year strong. I think it’s really important to make sure you’re checking in with your goals throughout the year because it’s so easy to set goals and never think about them again and never make progress toward accomplishing them. That’s how people end up setting the same goals over and over and over again, but never actually hitting them or moving closer to them. So this is your mid-year checkpoint. We are gonna go through some questions that I ask my clients just to get your mind right and reset as you finish out the first half of the year and head into the second half, so you can make sure that you’re on track, or get yourself back on track with your goals. Alright, the first question is, what were the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? What were the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? It’s such an important question, because a lot of times we don’t even set goals. And when you don’t set goals, you don’t have direction for your year. It’s like that saying, if you aim at nothing, you hit it every time. That’s what happens when we don’t set goals. We’re just kind of drifting aimlessly right? You’re not working toward anything. There’s no guiding point. We’ve talked before on the podcast about my view of goals and how they’re not necessarily an endpoint, but they’re more like your guiding star. They show you whether you’re moving in the right direction. If you’re getting closer to the goal, you know you’re moving in the right direction. If you’re not, you need to change something. So what were the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? If you didn’t set any goals at the beginning of the year, then let’s set some now for the second half of the year. What do you want to accomplish with your finances? What do you want to be working toward as you finish out the year? If you did set goals, but you haven’t looked at them since you set them, let’s dig those out and see what it was that you wanted to accomplish because you’ve still got a lot of time to make progress toward the goals or even to fully accomplish them. So that’s the first question. What were the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? The next question is, are you on track for those goals? Are you on track? If you are a New Year’s resolution person, maybe you set your goal back in January, and maybe you’re on track, but maybe you’re not right? We’re almost halfway through the year. Are you almost halfway to the goal? Where are you in relation to the goal, in comparison to when you set it? So if you set your goal in January, we’re now in June. We’re almost six months into the year. Are you almost halfway to that goal? And then the next part of that question is, why? Or why not? So we asked before, like, are you on track for the goal? This question is, why are you on track? If you are, or why are you not on track? If you’re not, the question of why you’re on track is something that I teach my clients to look at and you are doing something that you want to be doing, when you see that you’re making progress that you want to be making, when you see that you’re on track for a goal that you want to hit, when you see that you’ve hit a goal. Whatever the thing is, why? Why did that happen? What is it that you did that made that happen? How did you do that? It’s important to highlight the reasons why it happened to show yourself how the things that you did led to you being on track or to achieving that goal. Because so often we attribute things to luck, where we think that things just happen to work out the way they did, right? And that’s not the case, like you did certain things or didn’t do certain things that led to where you are with your finances, that led to you being on track for your goal or achieving your goal. So why are you on track? Find all the reasons, all the things you did, all the things you didn’t do that, have made it so you’re on track for your goal. Similarly, if you’re not on track, why are you not on track? Because, again, it’s not just circumstances around you aren’t working out in your favor, or any of those kinds of things. Like, yeah, sometimes there are things that happen that are outside of your control, but you have a lot of control over what happens with your finances, and we often forget that we will defer to all the things around us for why we can’t do the things we want to do and why we can’t achieve the things we want to achieve. But you can do certain things and not do certain things that lead to you being on track, or at least you being closer to the goals you want to achieve, just like you can do certain things and not do certain things that lead to you not being on track with the goals you want to achieve. So if you’re not on track, why not? What are the things that you have done or that you haven’t done that have led to you not being on track for your goal. What are the things that you have been thinking about your finances that have contributed to you not being on track with your goal? Or maybe you just haven’t been thinking about your finances at all? That’s something too Right? But it’s important for you to identify those things, because those are the things that you need to change to get on track to achieve the goal. So why are you not on track? Find all the reasons, and the final question is, what do you need to do to do to make sure that achieving your goal is inevitable? What do you need to do to make sure that achieving your goal is inevitable? So if you’re already on track, maybe you just need to keep doing what you’re doing right? You’re already doing the things that are leading to you being on track with that goal. Presumably, if you keep those up, then you will achieve the goal. If you’re not on track, what do you need to do differently to make achieving your goal inevitable? What things have you been doing that you need to stop doing that will allow you to get closer to the goal? What have you not been doing that you need to start doing that will allow you to get closer to the goal. And again, you want to think about the things that are within your control to achieve your goals. As we talked about earlier, your goal is not necessarily this endpoint that you’re trying to get to, but the goal is showing you whether or not you’re on the right track. So when you’re thinking about what you need to do to make that make sure that achieving the goal is inevitable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll achieve the goal by the end of this year. Great if you do. But what do you need to do to make sure that you will achieve that goal, even if it ends up being at a different time, the middle of next year, like that, right? What do you need to do to make sure that you’re still able to achieve the goal, even if it’s not necessarily within the time frame that you originally wanted? We want to identify what those things are so that you can start doing them or stop doing them, and get on track to achieve your goals. All right, so that is the mid year checkpoint. Explore these questions to look at where you’re at with your financial goals and what you need to do to get yourself on track if you’re not already and listen, if one of your goals is to get out of debt. Join me for my free workshop on June 17, called how to break the debt cycle. You’ll learn what the debt cycle is, why so many lawyers stay in it, the exact steps you need to take to break free for good, and how my six month group program, the Wealthyesq group, will help you do it. Save your seat for the workshop at road thomas.com/workshop. Immediately after the workshop, enrollment will open for the Wealthyesq group, so you can get all the support you need to achieve your goals. The group will get started in July, and we will finish before the end of the year. So if you’re not on track with your goals and you want a step by step roadmap to get out of debt and get your finances in order, you definitely want to join us. You can get more details for the group at rho thomas.com/coaching. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. Thank you so much for joining me. As always, please take a second and share this episode with a friend or two you think use the information that is how we grow the show and get the information in the hands of more lawyers. And as always, I appreciate your support. As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and realization that wealth is available to you. And you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live a life of freedom and choice, you deserve. Talk to you later.