Edition 280 – Half Time

Today is the 30th of June, the last day of the financial year. For the numbers nerds, it’s the 181st day of the year. There are 184 to go.

From a financial perspective, being the last day of the financial year, it’s the day of stocktakes, mass invoicing and tidying up loose ends. It’s an important day.

From a business perspective, we’re only half way through 2021. It’s a good time to stop, take stock and ask yourself, how are we travelling on meeting our goals for 2021?

With that in mind, ask yourself the following:

1. Where was our business at the start of 2021, where did we want our business to be at the end of 2021 and how far have we progressed?
2. What new learnings have I acquired this year and how have I grown as a person?
3. What’s the biggest change I’ve made in my business life in the year to date?
4. What’s the biggest change I’ve made in my personal life in the year to date?
5. What have I done to reach out to those around me and help them grow?
6. What would I do differently in the past 6 months, knowing what I know now, if I had my time over again?
7. What problems am I dealing with today that were the same problems that I was dealing with on the 1st of January this year?

The reason I’m setting you, dear reader, these tasks today is that six months is a reasonable enough period of time to have made changes in your life. My guess is that everyone will fall into one of four grades when they assess themselves:

1. No change – which actually means you’re slipping backwards.
2. Some change – with a lack of time to make change the most prominent excuse they’re using.
3. Reasonable change – with a marginal, yet quantifiable difference in some aspect of their lives.
4. Significant change – where those around you voice aloud their observation that something looks and feels different.

In my late teens, as a struggling university student,  I’d regularly visit my maternal grandmother, Nellie, in a nursing home in Narraweena on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Paralysed at the age of 80 after suffering a stroke, her life, confined as it was to a wheelchair, revolved around the communal bedroom she shared with three other ladies, the activities room or the dining room. That was her world. As we’d chat away and share a box of Smarties, she’d often remark how quickly time had slipped by. She’d talk over her childhood or her days courting her beloved George with not only great fondness, but with a twinkle of sadness at the previous 80 plus years passing in the blink of an eye.

80 years, or however many you have under your belt, is merely a bunch of 6 months intervals whacked together. In the whole scheme of things, we don’t have long around these parts to make a difference and build the life that we truly want to live. If we’ve made no change or no progress in 6 months, chances are you’ll look back in 5 years time and still have made no progress. In my middle years, I’m more convinced of this than at any other time in my life.

Now is the time! Instead of saying “someday”, take the first step in making “today” the first day down the path of change.

Small changes can create a big impact – we merely need a plan and patience.