Hello July

As I grow older I tend to find that the days are passing by so fast. Can you believe the year is halfway done. How are you responding to this news. Are you down in the dumps about it because you are not where you want to be with your goals? Or are you being optimistic about life and looking at this midway point as the time to reset, reboot, and restate your goals for the rest if the year? I am choosing optimism, and that is my key word for the rest of the year. No one said that goal setting is limited to the beginning of the year you can set goals any time of the year. But bear in mind goals require action top put them into motion.

If you are one that set your goals at the beginning of the year and find you have not made any movement towards them you need to look back over the past 6 months and ask yourself whether you took any action towards them. Writing down your goals is just a small step in the journey. You also need planning and action, but then again dont get too bogged down with planning either sooner or later you have to take action. Otherwise you might find yourself in the same place you are today.

Two strategies I can share and that I am currently using are mind mapping or brain dumping and a daily gratitude/optimism challenge. I will briefly explain how I am doing these.

1. Mind Mapping

I am using this strategy to help me break down my goals into small manageable chunks. Let’s take finances as a broad category. Under finances you might have smaller goals attached such as pay off credit card, save more money, budget better, increase my income. Stated this way these goals have a high likelihood of staying on paper. The first step to creating an achievable goal is making it specific and time sensitive. So given these goals I would state then as

• I want to pay off my $500 credit card balance by the end of October
• I want to have saved $1000 by December 31st 2018
• I want to do a monthly household budget for the remainder of the year
• I want to increase my income by $250 a month

You can then create a mind map with finances as the central theme and the required outcomes can stem from them. You can then create a diagram as I have done to show you an example. You will then be able to think through what steps you can take to get to each desired outcome. As you go through each step you can mark of each completed task. The fun part about mindmapping is that you can use it to create your daily to do lists too.

2. Gratefulness and Optimism Challenge

I recently started on this challenge and it will do wonders for your life. Start each day by writing down 5 things you are grateful for. There are so many things to be grateful for that I feel we forget to take the time to acknowledge our blessings due to the fast paced way we live our lives. Once you have written down what you are grateful for, use your mind map to identify certain tasks you can work on for the day and incorporate them into your optimism list. Given your financial goals ahead you might want to include today I am optimistic about updating my resume, researching different budgets, Reviewing my bank statement etc etc heres an example you can use

Today I am grateful for

• My God who heals me
• My husband
• My kids
• My parents
• My extended family

Today I am optimistic about

• Working on the monthly budget
• Researching business ideas
• Reading 2 chapters from the book I am reading
• Setting up direct payments for my Bill’s

Remember these are just examples that you can use for the different categories of your life. Try this strategy out as you continue with the rest of the year and let me know how you get on.

With love and gratitude

Dr Fatsani Dogani