Happy Monday, ladies! I seriously cannot believe it’s already July. It’s completely nuts and I feel like time is passing faster than I am able to cope with. All of a sudden, it’s been 6 months and I’m ready to check in on my goals again. I did a 3 month check in at the end of March if you’re interested in that. I walked you through the steps for preforming your own goal check in in that post! In today’s post I’m going to talk about pivoting, or changing your goal without changing everything about it. Think of it like how Instagram used to be a do-everything app, but their photo feature took hold, so they pivoted and focused just on that feature. Now look at IG.

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IS PIVOTING GIVING UP?

Short answer: no.

But here’s the long answer. No matter how hard we try, it’s *literally* impossible to plan for everything. Life throws wrenches in our plans all the time. And we often don’t have the experience we need to think of every possible aspect of every goal. And sometimes we think we want something, but when we have it or even get close to having it, we’re not excited anymore.

Pivoting is not giving up. Pivoting is adjusting the plan and the strategy to reflect what you’ve learned, how you’ve changed, and what you actually want to get out of a goal. Even if we decide we don’t want our original goal anymore, usually we realize we wanted something else similar to it or maybe a more specific aspect (think bikini body vs. just more toned legs). So, we should pivot. We need to refine our goal and change our strategy to stay on course.

So how do you know exactly when to pivot?

KNOWING WHEN TO PIVOT

One problem we have when we set goals and really think them through and plan them is a tendency to get stuck because we put in so much work already. We think, “I’ve put in hours of work, I planned this out. I know the steps and I will succeed.” Which is not inherently bad, like at all. We should all totally think like that. Until we shouldn’t.

We keep telling ourselves that over, and over, and over. But our passion and commitment is gone, it becomes more about finishing something you started than accomplishing a goal you set out to do. You wouldn’t try to finish a gallon of milk after it had gone rancid, so why would continue on with a goal or plan that makes you feel like shit? It’s not always the whole goal, sometimes it’s just part of it. But there is a difference between self discipline and forcing yourself to do something that isn’t working for you.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

Pay attention to how you feel. Much of life is running through the motions. But if you set a goal six months ago and now you’re just running through the motion of it, and not excited anymore, something is wrong. If the thought of accomplishing that goal doesn’t make your belly feel all funny and make you happy, you need to pivot.

Pay attention to how you are progressing. If you are putting in hours of work, and not getting a result, that’s not good! Although most goals do have a plateau period, even a plateau can be a sign that you need to pivot. If your goal is to grow your instagram audience and you are spending hour after hour researching hashtags, testing, and analyzing them, and you’re not seeing a increase in your rate of growth, you need to pivot. Your rate of growth or return on investment (ROI) needs to be something that grows at you get closer to your goal, not a value that stays stagnant.

Not all goals have a snowball effect, but most do. If you’re six months in and haven’t seen a snowball, you might need to pivot. Early on you put in a lot of work, for less result, but as you progress you should be seeing more results with less work. Things should start falling into place. If you’re forcing things to be a certain way still, you need to pivot.

HOW I PLAN TO PIVOT IN THE NEXT 6 MONTHS

So now I’m going to go into some of my goals and how I’m planning to pivot. Hopefully this will give you some inspiration and examples of how to pivot and what it looks like when you do.

RECAP

At my 3 month update, I was in the depths of some serious anxiety about who knows what. And I didn’t know I was barreling straight for even more of that. I did a massive brain dump, I evaluated how I was spending my time, what things I was slacking off on, etc.

In the beginning of the year, I intended to work toward every goal every day (or almost every day). I laid out my plans really well and had a pretty good schedule set up for them, actually. But after 3 months, I realized that wasn’t working. So I decided I wanted to test out focus days, where I focus on only one thing for an entire day. That process worked really well for quite a few tasks, but not quite all of them.

EVALUATING MY GOALS

So setting focus days was a good idea, but it wasn’t perfect. I am way too easily distracted to only do a tiny bit of a goal each day, but I also crave distraction to maintain my creativity and endurance. In fact, this post is so heavily thought out, I’m needing to take “distraction breaks” to get away from the computer and allow myself to think without typing. So I was onto something 3 months ago, but I need to pivot a little bit in the execution.

Now for actual goals. At the beginning of the year I shared a few goals and resolutions (or habits) I wanted to achieve, and I had a few more listed in my planner. Looking at my goals, I wanted to take the GRE, write a book, launch a new website, and facelift my Pinterest. All three things still make me feel very excited, but honestly, it’s too much. Those goals plus the more personal ones I have in my planner are just too much on my brain for reasons I wasn’t prepared for. So I need to pivot there.

For resolutions, I told you I wanted to fall asleep without my phone, take time to meditate, and make the gym a regular habit. Getting to the gym is still pretty impossible for me, and that’s why Workout Wednesday posts have been suspended. I have some thoughts on that, but I’ll share that below. As far as falling asleep without my phone and taking time to meditate, I really attempted those and still do, but I think those resolutions can be refined and combined a little better.

THE PIVOTS

Focus Days

Like I said above, I do actually need distraction to maintain my stamina. So I’m working on setting about 7 daily tasks that have to get done. And I’m trying to break up the big tasks with smaller things. I’m breaking up this post with tidying the house and filling our reusable water bottles. It gets me out of my chair for a couple minutes when I get antsy and I’m getting things crossed off my list. Right now, this is working really well.

Goals

For my goals, I had a ton that I am still very excited about, but my timelines were way too short and there were some major mental roadblocks slowing me down anyway. So I’ve back-burnered a couple until next year, and a few more have been moved to brain break activities. I’ve set up a few notebook pages that I can scribble in and jot down my thoughts without needing to be formal about it. This way, when I’m ready to focus on those goals as a priority, I can compile those notes in an organized way and have a suitable platform of progress to work from.

The goals I’ve decided to back-burner completely (all though I still have a page for notes if I’m in the mood), have been postponed for one important reason: unforeseen roadblocks that I don’t have the mental energy to deal with. Time is certainly a factor, but if my head’s in it enough, time won’t stop me. So I need to set aside these goals until I can get in in my head to get past the unrelated, but still impactful, roadblock.

I am actively focusing on one major goal right now and I’m seeing really good progress! I’m still working on fine tuning the strategy, but I’m very happy with the success and I think I’ll actually have accomplished it sooner than I expected.

Resolutions or Habits

Regarding those pesky resolutions, when it comes to fitness, I’ve pretty much figured out what my roadblock is for part of it and that should be cleared up in about a month. In the meantime, I’m focusing on eating right and drinking enough water. For summer time, I’ve totally got this nailed down. When school starts again I’ll need to adjust, but that’s just fine.

For meditation and my phone: Instead of focusing on those two things, what I really want is just to be more in tune with my thoughts and feelings and their origins. I thought those habits would lead to that and they kind of do, but not perfectly. So instead of meditating a certain way every day, I’m trying to remind myself all day to check in with how I feel. Right now I feel really tired and it’s a bit challenging to breath, after checking in, I can tell that it has a lot to do with how I slept last night. But I feel better than I did two hours ago, when I felt really tired and realized it was because I was hungry and I needed some cold water. Food and water later, I felt better. After this post I’m going to take a nap. Done and done.

For my phone, it actually makes me pretty drowsy most nights when I can’t sleep easily, so I’m just working toward putting it down more often to see if I’m ready to fall asleep or if I need to browse a few more funny memes to help me relax. But again, it’s all about a more frequent personal check in. I’m really happy with this pivot and I’ll keep working with this strategy until I plateau.

How are you doing on your goals? Are you progressing right along, or do you need to pivot?