Monthly review August – failing, pausing and changing direction

Each month I review my progress (or lack of!) towards my personal goals for 2014. You can see my full goal list in this post here – Goal Setting For 2014 And Creating My Decision Making Framework. The monthly review will look at my key learnings for the month and each quarter I write a full review of my progress. This month the focus is on my goal to increase family harmony.

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map - changing direction
Do you ever take moments to pause and decide your approach to life in general over the next few months? One of the reasons why I continue to write my monthly reviews on the blog is so I can do this. I have written before about how I find aiming for “balance” stressful. Instead I tend to tilt my time towards key activities at different points in time.

August saw me tilted more towards work and with a peak in my running training, as noted in last week’s newsletter, the impact of this was to see harmony in the family decrease. A major fail for me in a key goal last month.

September will see me tilted towards work for another month as I work on producing the calendar and some freelance work. Writing this down helped me to pause and think about:

  1. How will I better manage my behaviour to minimise my impact on family harmony?
  2. Is this current tilting sustainable?

To help with question one I have decided the following:

  • Recycle menu plans – I have gone back to a similar time last year and will use the following menu plans Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4
  • Attend a weekly yoga class – I didn’t make it to any classes in August and for someone who does a lot of high intensity exercise, I missed the calming affect of yoga so need to make sure I fit it in.
  • Breathing – it sounds ridiculous I know but taking time out across my day to practice deep breathing and simply focusing on my breathing. This helps me a lot especially when I look at my to do list and it starts to overwhelm me.

The answer to question two (is this current tilting sustainable) is no and from October until the end of the year, I will be tilting towards the family. I won’t be taking on any new work during this period and from mid October my running training will reduce as well. I am looking forward to tilting back!

I asked readers on facebook if they are taking time out to assess where they are at currently and if they are going to make changes for the remainder of the year. As you can see from below {click through here if you cannot see the facebook comments} I am not on my own.

I think the change of seasons also has something to do with the my wanting this change too. Even though I know I still have a lot of work to get through in September, I am okay now knowing that I have a plan and that sunshine is coming!

What about you? Do you need to change direction too?