Back to school – how to finish your year strong

tips for back-to-school success

I don’t know about you, but this time of year is deeply ingrained in my whole being as ‘back-to-school’ season. It’s when I’ve always got my things in order after the summer break, bought new stationery and Clark’s school shoes (well, not so much the shoes anymore…), and re-focused on the new term ahead. We may not be tied to the academic year anymore – although if you have children then you probably still are! – but this seasonality is a great framework to use for our careers and our businesses too. Now is the perfect time to finish your year strong and set yourself up for success in 2019.

It can be tempting to let that slow pace of summer flow into the autumn period, to slow down as you reach the finishing line of 31st December and to postpone doing anything about anything until the clock strikes midnight and you wake up with renewed energy to once again set ambitious New Year’s Resolutions for 2019. But do you want to end this year with a massive sense of regret and disappointment over all the things you didn’t do this year? Do you want to come face to face with a string of excuses as to why you didn’t do all those things – procrastination, lack of discipline, perfectionism, this happened, that happened…? Or do you want to end 2018 with a feeling of empowerment and immense satisfaction?

Here are five things you can do to get back on track, finish your year strong, and set yourself up for success in 2019:

1. De-clutter your space

Whether it’s your bedroom, where clearing up will help you sleep better, or your office, where sorting out your documents will make you more productive, de-cluttering your living space is going to have positive repercussions across all different areas of your life. Take some time to donate ill-fitting clothes to charity, sell handbags that you don’t use anymore on eBay, and throw things away that no one is going to want anymore. Check out Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying for inspiration and a new approach to thinking about your stuff!

In sorting through your things, you also want to get rid of all those little annoyances. For example, I have an old computer that I’ve been meaning to sell but I had an issue with re-installing the operating system and so I got stuck and it’s been lying there ever since. Dealing with this once and for all will get rid of the laptop and cable that’s just lying on my chest of drawers and will give me some extra money when I return it as well as a sense of satisfaction when I finally do something about it.

2. Get your health in order

Now that you’ve got your home and work environment in order, you want to get yourself in order! You don’t want to get to Christmas and already have a lot of excess weight to deal with, and you don’t just want to write off the rest of the year now and tell yourself you’ll start dieting and exercising in the New Year. Now is the time to set yourself up for success in 2019 by getting back on track with nutrition, fitness and any other aspects of physical and mental health that need seeing to.

In fact, more than your wellbeing, why not take this opportunity to check in with how you’re doing across all different areas of your life, including your relationships and especially your relationships with your partner, children and other key people in your life? Use the success audit to review the ‘5Ls’ (LIVE, LOVE, LEARN, LEAD, LAUGH) and see where there are gaps that you can focus on closing in the next few months. You may be after that all-elusive ‘work-life balance’ but remember that work is just one part of life – an important one, but still only one. Get the success audit here >>

3. Check your progress on this year’s goals

We need to look back before we look forward, so grab your goals that you set yourself for this year and let’s see how you’ve been getting on. If you’ve been part of my community for a while and were with me at the start of the year, you can look back on the work you did as part of the webinar and planning we did back in December/January. This will include an overarching theme as well as goals across the 5L areas, as well as potentially also including goals for launching your business.

As you look at the goals that you set and how well you’ve done on executing these, ask yourself:

  • What have been your wins so far this year? What have been your biggest successes?
  • What are the things that haven’t gone quite as you had planned? What lessons have you learned as a result?
  • Where are you most frustrated about not making any progress?

We’ll use these insights in the next step, where you’ll…

4. Set goals for the end of the year

Depending on how ambitious you were at the start of the year, and how effective you’ve been in working towards your goals so far, you may have a lot of goals still remaining. At this stage, given that you only have four months to go, you’re probably not going to be able to finish absolutely everything that’s still on your list; you’re only postponing disappointment if you keep telling yourself that you’re going to be able to do everything. Instead, choose the most important things that are on the list: the goals that will mean the most to you and that will make the biggest difference in your life.

To do this, look back on your notes from the previous step and in particular at the goals where you were most frustrated about not making any progress:

  • Are these goals still important to you? Why?
  • What will be different in your life once you’ve achieved these goals?
  • Which of these goals is going to create the most amount of forward motion and make the biggest impact in the areas of your life that are most important to you?

Choose one big goal that will make 2018 a cracking year for you when you ultimately achieve it by the end of December.

5. Take action

Okay, now I would usually follow on from the goal-setting step with a planning step – after all, having a plan for how you’ll achieve your goals will give you a framework and takes some of the emotion out of the process. However, this is a goal that you’ve had for a long time, that you set yourself at the start of the year and that you still haven’t done anything about. So rather than giving you more excuses to procrastinate and put off taking action any longer, I want to get you taking action RIGHT NOW.

  • What do you need in order to move forward with this goal?
  • Is there information that’s missing – in which case, what can you do to start collecting for that information?
  • Is there a preliminary step that needs to happen before you can do the thing, for example, do you need to save x amount of money as a safety net?
  • Do you want to partner with a coach who will guide you through the process and help you hit your deadline of the end of the year, once and for all (think how powerful it is to get a personal trainer to help you reach your weight loss goals versus just trying to follow free training videos and diet tips without any kind of structure, accountability or customised programme)?
  • What can you do TODAY to move forwards with this idea – send an email, book a discovery call, look into the options available to you?

NOW is the time to stop procrastinating and finish your year strong. So what’s your ONE STEP going to be?

Book a discovery call with me to discuss how I can support you in this end-of-year period, and beyond, to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.

To get support with free training sessions, Q&A and other fun stuff, come on over and join us in the Facebook group.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You might also be interested in these articles

“Everything you’ve ever
wanted is one step outside
your comfort zone.”

Book a free consultation

Get on the phone with Anna to discuss your unique goals and situation to determine the best programme for you, so you can start taking action towards creating the business and lifestyle you desire.

Explore a broader definition of success

Download this free assessment to consider what ‘success’ means to you across different areas of your life, evaluate where you are today, and prioritise the right goals to get you to where you want to be.

We will use and protect your data in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Explore a broader definition of success

Download this free assessment to consider what ‘success’ means to you across different areas of your life, evaluate where you are today, and prioritise the right goals to get you to where you want to be.

We will use and protect your data in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Outside of the 9 to 5

Anna continues the journey in her new book, where she details what’s needed to sustain your initial escape from the 9 to 5 in a guide to designing and building a profitable business that gives you more freedom, flexibility and fulfilment.

We will use and protect your data in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy

This privacy policy sets out how One Step Outside uses and protects any information that you give One Step Outside when you use this website (https://onestepoutside.com/).

One Step Outside is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

One Step Outside may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes.

What information we collect and why

We only ever collect the information that we need in order to serve you.

Generally, this just means collecting your first name and email address that you enter, for example, when you request a resource, register for a webinar, or submit a message via a contact form.

If you are a paying customer, we also collect your billing information including your last name and your postal address.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Contact forms

We use Gravity Forms to allow you to contact us via the website. We will use the information you submit for the sole purpose of that specific form and will explicitly ask you to provide your consent to allow us to do so.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Advertising and Analytics

Google

We use Google Analytics to track and optimise performance on this site as well as embedding video content from YouTube, and this means that your web browser automatically sends certain information to Google. This includes the URL of the page that you’re visiting and your IP address. Google may also set cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already there. Apps that use Google advertising services also share information with Google, such as the name of the app and a unique identifier for advertising.

Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse and personalise content and ads that you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps. See their Privacy Policy to learn more about how they process data for each of these purposes, and their Advertising page for more about Google ads, how your information is used in the context of advertising and how long Google stores this information.

Facebook

We use the conversion tracking and custom audiences via the Facebook pixel on our website. This allows user behaviour to be tracked after they have been redirected to our website by clicking on a Facebook ad and enables us to measure the effectiveness of our Facebook ads. The data collected in this way is anonymous to us, i.e. we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Facebook, who may link this information to your Facebook account and also use it for its own promotional purposes, in accordance with Facebook’s Data Usage Policy https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/.

You can allow Facebook and its partners to place ads on and off Facebook. A cookie may also be stored on your computer for these purposes. You can revoke your permission directly on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen. For more guidance on opting out you can also consult http://www.aboutads.info/choices.

Who we share your data with

We use a number of third parties to provide us with services which are necessary to run our business or to assist us with running our business and who process your information for us on our behalf. These include a hosting and email provider (Siteground), mailing list provider (GetResponse), and a payment provider (Stripe).

Your information will be shared with these service providers only where necessary to enable us to run our business.

How long we maintain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

The main reason for collecting this information is to be able to send you resources, updates and, sometimes, information and products and services, as well as for internal record keeping.

The rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

How we protect your data

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure.

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password that lets you access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential and we ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Links to other websites

Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to this website so once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. Initially created on 18th November 2016, it was last updated on 23rd May 2018 to be compliant with GDPR.

Contact information

If you have any questions or concerns related to your privacy, you can get in touch here >>