2022 Habits + Goals: Time for a six month review!

2022 will be half way over in TWO days! That’s crazy, right?! It’s mind-boggling how quickly time flies.

If you set some goals at the beginning of the year that you wanted to achieve in 2022, how are they going?

Towards the end of 2021, I started thinking about goals in a different way, thanks mostly to the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book has been life-changing for me, and it’s on my read-again-every-year list, which is a hard list to get on. 😉 After reading this book, I realized something that was a serious light bulb moment:

Creating solid habits is key to achieving my goals

It all starts with a habit. So, while keeping in mind my overall goals, I’ve been working to create the habits that will lead to those goals. And I’ve realized that even the smallest habit can make a big difference!

If you’d like to read more about habits + get some tips for creating habits, go here.

According to research, only 8% of people keep their New Year’s Resolutions—the goals they have for the year. If you’re in that 8%, all is not lost. Not at all! In fact, let’s look at July 1st as a new opportunity to still finish out the year strong goals-wise.

And since our habits—the things we do every day—really do lead to achieving our goals, let’s focus on those habits. Here are three things you can do to get right back on track any time you’re struggling with a habit, and they make a handy acronym too: RAD

The R.A.D. process for Nailing your habits

Review.  This one has two parts:

1. Review what worked and celebrate, celebrate, celebrate! It’s so easy to focus on what didn’t work and totally forget about everything that went well. So always be sure to celebrate even the tiniest of successes!
2. Review what didn’t work and try and figure out why it didn’t work.  Most importantly, don’t beat yourself up for what didn’t work. You didn’t fail, you just got an education about what to do or not to do next time. Learn from that education! Take a lesson from what Thomas Edison learned when inventing the light bulb:

“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

Adjust. What needs to be tweaked or changed so you can keep that habit and reach your goal? It’s okay to make adjustments. This is your habit, after all, and you are in total control of that habit and what “counts.”

Drop. If a habit isn’t serving you well, then drop it! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this. And when you drop a habit, you can still rest assured that the work you did on that habit isn’t in vain. We can learn something from everything we do!

Where both Adjust and Drop are concerned, I learned a valuable lesson from Jon Acuff, one of my favorite authors. When we set those new 2022 goals at the end of the year, that person is different from the person we see in the mirror later in the year. Things have happened since we set those goals, and often, those things can affect our progress towards our goals and how well we can create new habits. Jon said something like this…

Don’t hold “July” you to “January” you. “January” you didn’t know “July” you and what would happen between January and July.

No matter how much we want to achieve a goal or create new habits, and no matter how much we work on our goals and habits, things ARE going to happen that can affect our progress. And often, these things are out of our control. So, take Jon’s advice and give some grace to the “July” you, learn from what happened between January and July, and keep going!

Here’s a personal example: One of my habits I’m working on is working out for 30 minutes, 4 days/week. This is a totally doable habit, even when life gets crazy. But, I tweaked my lower back somehow during a workout at the beginning of May. I don’t even know what I did to cause the issue because I’m super careful when I’m working out, especially with keeping my lower back healthy and protected. But, it happened, and that injury has kept me from working out like I wanted to, and even at all some days, because lower back pain can be very workout-limiting. Even walking around our neighborhood doesn’t always work, and it is so frustrating! But, I’ve been trying to give myself some grace, figure out what I can do, be super careful, and hopefully, it will get better and I can get back to what I really want to do workout-wise.

And once I can get back to more “normal” workouts, I won’t take any workout for granted. See…there’s that learning part coming into play!

What habits are you working on? What habits would you like to be working on?

Try and tackle only one new thing at a time, practice the RAD process, and those habits will help you nail your goals.