Halfway There - and I'm Stopping to Look Up
By Erica Ogden | Set Apart Coaching
There is something about the month of June that always makes me pause.
Not in a stressed, overwhelmed kind of way. More like that feeling you get when you're on a long road trip and you see the sign that says you're halfway to your destination. You take a deep breath. You feel that quiet relief that you've made it this far... and then almost immediately you feel the tension of knowing you still have just as far to go. You glance at the gas tank. You check the map. You maybe grab a snack and remind yourself where you're going and why you got in the car in the first place.
June is my sign on the highway. And every year, I pull over on purpose.
The Reflection I Do Every Single Year
At the beginning of every year, I sit down and write out my goals by hand first. There is something about putting pen to paper that makes them feel real in a way that typing doesn't. Then I type them, print them, and put them in places where I will actually see them throughout the year - because a goal you can't see is a goal you will forget.
And then every single day, I track my progress toward them. Every week I summarize that tracking. Every month I summarize those weeks. I will be honest with you - I am not perfect at this. I would give myself an eight out of ten. Some weeks I miss a day. Some months I have to piece things together from memory. But I started this habit from scratch and it has taken a full year to build it to where it is now, and that is something I am genuinely proud of.
An imperfect system that you actually use will always beat a perfect system that lives only in your head.
So by the time June rolls around, I am not starting from scratch trying to remember what I even set out to do back in January. I have six months of information sitting right in front of me.
That mid-year reflection sits down with all of it.
I look at what I accomplished - and I celebrate that honestly, not just gloss over it to get to the next thing. I look at what I accomplished that I never even planned for, because sometimes God redirects you toward something better than what you originally wrote down and that deserves acknowledgment too. And then I look at what I set out to do that hasn't happened yet, and I ask myself the most important question of the whole process:
Does this still matter to me?
Not every goal that made sense in January still makes sense in June. Life shifts. Priorities evolve. Sometimes what you thought you wanted reveals itself to be someone else's version of success that you had quietly adopted as your own. And June is the moment to release that without guilt and recommit to what is actually yours.
Why Most People Skip This Step
Here is what I have learned about the people who set goals in January and then wonder in December why nothing changed: it is almost never a motivation problem. It is almost never a discipline problem either, at least not at its root.
It is a clarity problem. And underneath the clarity problem is almost always a time problem.
We do not make time to reflect because we are too busy reacting. We are so deep in the daily grind of just getting through that we never come up for air long enough to ask whether we are grinding in the right direction. And the enemy loves nothing more than a woman who is exhausted, busy, and moving fast - but moving toward the wrong thing.
Proverbs 16:9 says, "In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps." I love that verse because it doesn't tell us not to plan. It tells us to hold our plans with open hands. To make them, work them, and stay in constant enough conversation with God that when He redirects us we are paying enough attention to notice.
That only happens when we slow down long enough to look up.
What I'm Doing Differently This June
This year my mid-year reflection feels different. May was a lot - beautiful and full and bittersweet in all the right ways - and I am walking into June a little tender and a whole lot grateful. My littlest finished kindergarten. And Jake... Jake leaves for college on June 24th. He is not gone yet, but the countdown is very real and this mama is feeling every single day of it.
So this year when I pull out my goals and sit down with six months of information, I am also giving myself permission to just... feel the weight of it. To acknowledge that some of what I set out to accomplish this year got set aside for things that mattered more. And to decide, with clear eyes and a full heart, what the second half of this year is actually going to look like.
Not what it looked like on paper in January.
What I want it to look like now.
Your Invitation
I want to challenge you to do the same thing this June. You don't have to have a perfect system. You don't have to have been tracking flawlessly all year. You just need a quiet hour, your original goals if you wrote them down, and an honest conversation with yourself and with God about where you are and where you still want to go.
Ask yourself:
What did I accomplish in the first half of this year that deserves to be celebrated?
What happened that I didn't plan for - and was it a detour or a redirect?
What still matters to me, and what am I ready to release?
What does the second half of this year need to look like for me to reach December feeling proud?
Write it down. Hold it loosely. And then make a plan.
Because we cannot manage our time toward something we haven't clearly defined. And we cannot finish well what we never stop to reassess.
Here's to the second half.
Psalm 37:5 - "Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this."
Erica Ogden
