Your Mid Year Check In

We’re nearly halfway through the year and many of us have had a lot of time inside allowing us to deal with emotions, changes, and come face to face with fears and realities we may usually brush away. While the first half of the year is nothing like what we could have imagined, it’s never too late to take steps to help you tap into your own innate power and help you finish the year off on a high note. As the world is starting to open up in a lot of places, this is such a good time to reflect back on what your intentions were at the beginning of the year and how this new reality has affected them. This is not an opportunity to be hard on yourself for not sticking to your resolutions, but a gentle check-in to help you get clear on what you want to invite in your life. You can think about how this situation may have changed you, where you have grown and where you have become more resilient. The nature of life is evolution and the truth is, you will never be in the exact same place twice whether you recognize it now or not.

This is a nice opportunity to check in with yourself and get really honest with what you want to see unfold for the rest of the year. It is time to continue building internal resilience as a result of the changing landscape.

A simple journaling session can be a cathartic exercise to help you quiet the noise and get your thoughts on paper so you can begin to take action. So if you’re ready, grab a journal and a pen, perhaps light a candle or meditate before, and use these prompts below to help guide your writing. Let whatever comes up to just come up, without judgment.

• How am I feeling right now?

• Where have I grown in the last 6 months?

• What daily habit can I implement to get me where I want to be at the end of this year?

• What do I want right now in my professional life?

• What do I want to see in my personal life/relationships?

• How do I want to feel at the end of the year?

We Think It's Really Hard Too

We are all growing in one way or another. Sometimes it's voluntary and planned, like a promotion you work hard for, and other times life forces us the circumstances to grow as it has with our global pandemic. With everything that has happened in the world the last few months, chances are, life has handed you an opportunity to change and evolve. Whether it’s your business pivoting, reinventing yourself, or a relationship change, facing your growth edge head on is really challenging. It’s really hard.

So what can you do when you come to your growth edge? Self Care First off, be compassionate with yourself. Now is the time to double down on self-care. Get honest with yourself and take a few moments each day to check in and see what would be most supportive for you.

Make Time For Play

With all the change happening, making time for play. Schedule in time to just let go and have fun. This is absolutely crucial for your wellbeing and will make you more efficient when you do face your challenge. Talk it Out

Don’t keep your feelings buried inside. Talk to a coach, therapist, or trusted loved one to help you process your feelings about these changes. Give yourself the space to mourn the changes, while getting excited about the growth and evolution that is happening.

Where are you growing? What is your growth edge? I would love to know. Schedule in your 30-minute complimentary coaching session with me today.

The #1 Trait of Successful Leaders

Have you ever wondered what trait makes someone successful at work?

Is it their high IQ? Their relentless hard work? Or networking their way to the top?

The truth is, it is none of the above.

I work with a lot of successful business leaders who have shown me that in the modern workplace, an individual’s ability to thrive during periods of stress and change is really what sets them apart from the rest. The other factors above may help, but not in the face of failure, stress, and emotional experiences.

Enter the concept of resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability to overcome obstacles on the way to a goal, without being distracted by the things that happen along the way. It means having a home base to return to, even when things get hard. It means knowing how to ride out the hard times without being too hard on yourself. It’s the ability to just keep going. 

The best thing about resilience is that it’s a skill-- something you can practice and get better at over time.

It is something that I am constantly cultivating in my own business.

So, what are some ways you can flex your resilience muscle? Keep reading.

1. Access your inner calm

Applying various mindfulness tools can help us come back to our own foundation of resilience. Everything from meditation, to breathing exercises, journaling, and more are great tools for leaders to continually train their resilience.

2. Emotional reflection

Like all emotional experiences, success and failure manifest strongly in our bodies, so we must develop and strengthen our ability to reflect on emotional experiences.

3. Cultivate cognitive resilience

Failure is a part of doing business. What sets successful people apart is how they experience and explain their own failure to themselves. People who are pessimistic tend to internalize their failures, take them personally, and think they are pervasive in all areas of life. On the other hand, people who are optimistic see their setback as outcomes of certain conditions and temporary in nature.

​By practicing positivity at work, leaders are better equipped to adapt to challenges that may arise.