Are You On Track With Your Goals? Try Our Mid-Year Tune Up to Find Out

In January, you welcomed the new year with high hopes and a list of goals for 2025. Resolutions motivate you to make changes, achieve things you’ve always wanted to achieve and, hopefully, enjoy your year more than the previous one. But halfway through the year is a good time to hit pause, reflect and reassess. Are the goals you set six months ago still serving you well? Are you taking meaningful steps forward, or have some of your resolutions slipped to the back burner as life got busy?

Whether you’ve been steadily building momentum or your resolutions quietly faded into the background, you could benefit from a mid-year tune-up to recalibrate, refocus and re-energize for the months ahead. Here’s how to do it.

Step One: Do a Six-Month Self-Audit

The first step is to simply assess your progress, but do so without judgment. Start by reviewing your list of resolutions and noting what you’ve successfully implemented and what you haven’t. 

Here are some ideas for creating your self-audit list:

• Use a sheet of paper or a digital list to dissect your goals, progress, strengths and weaknesses. 
• Use a spreadsheet or graph to visualize your progress month by month. 
• Rank your goals, such as marking your progress on a scale of one to 10 (one for least amount of progress and 10 for maximum) or using a five-star system (one star for no progress, two stars for some progress, three stars for moderate progress, etc.).
• Collect clues if you don’t know how to measure your progress. Do you have journal entries, personal logs or photos? These may help you estimate how well you’ve done so far.

Step Two: Figuring Out the “Whys” 

After you’ve marked which goals need work, dig into why you haven’t implemented a new habit or taken the steps to achieve a resolution. Ask yourself, 

• Where have I stalled?
• What stopped me from reaching my targets?
• Have my circumstances, values or priorities changed?

Goals aren’t just checkboxes to tick off — you likely have deeper motivations behind your goals. Perhaps you set a resolution to do exercise three times a week or to read more books. But what’s the motivation behind that goal? If you’re struggling to follow through, it may be because your goal is no longer compelling, or you’ve lost sight of why the change felt important to you in the first place. 

For example, I set a New Year’s resolution to do yoga nearly every morning (and so far, I have failed). If I were to audit myself, I would learn that I haven’t met my goal because of unexpected life events, but also the reason I set this goal still resonates with me. For me, starting my day with yoga not only helps me stay fit, but it also helps with stress, chronic pain and mindfulness practices, all of which equate to a desire for more intentional, organized and healthy mornings. I know the why, which can help motivate me to pick myself back up and try again.

For your goals, determine if your initial reasoning still resonates with you. If it doesn’t, you can always adjust your goals for the next half of the year.

Step Three: Fine-Tune, Pivot and Adjust Your Goals

Separate your resolutions into those you want to keep, those you need to adjust, and those you will scrap because the goal just isn’t relevant anymore. For example, you might create a table with three columns — Keep Going, Needs Adjusting and Let It Go/Pivot.

Your “Keep Going” goals: These are the goals that you’ve made progress on and are still important to you. You’ll want to leave these as-is and continue to implement them for the rest of the year.

Your “Needs Adjusting” goals: This category is for goals that feel important but are overwhelming, vague or misaligned with your current values, time and energy. You can adjust these goals to be more specific, actionable and current to the present. Maybe your goal to “get healthier” simply becomes “walk for 30 minutes every day” or “drink more water and eat out less.”

Your “Let It Go/Pivot” goals: Put goals here that you feel are no longer important. It’s okay to let go of a goal that doesn’t fit your current needs. You may also put goals here that have promise but require a total overhaul to achieve them. For example, a goal to “journal daily” may feel too much, but maybe you still want to journal sporadically and choose to journal whenever you’re stressed or have had a hard day.

Step Four: Take Your Personality Into Account.

So you’ve taken stock, reflected on your whys, and revamped your goals. But there’s one more detail to consider: your personality. Taking your Myers and Briggs personality type into account can help you hone in on how you naturally approach motivation, structure, routines and goal-setting.

Here’s a cheat sheet for using your personality preferences to help you follow through on your goals:

Perceiving types: Perceiving types are spontaneous. Ultra-rigid goals are not your friends, so make sure to set goals that leave breathing room for variety and an adventurous, flexible approach. For instance, if you want to eat out less, you might have a goal of prepping all the week’s meals on Sunday. But after a few weeks, being tied to a set meal-prep day can feel like a drudge. Instead, try something more flexible, like “meal prep two to three days a week.” This gives you the choice to cook whenever you feel like it, rather than feeling married to a set day and time.

Judging types: Judging types like set, organized plans. You may be less inclined to follow through if your goal feels undefined or too broad. Try making goals concrete, writing an action plan or breaking big goals into actionable steps, so you feel organized and know exactly what to do.

Introvert / Extravert: Introverts are more likely to achieve goals that give them solo time to recharge. If one of your goals involves people-related activities, build some time for yourself before and after that activity so you have the energy to participate. Conversely, Extraverts will find people-oriented goals more achievable, so they might benefit by incorporating socializing into their goals, like finding a gym or accountability buddy or making meal prep a social event with a roommate.

Intuitive types: If you’re an Intuitive type, you prefer when goals aren’t too repetitive. Your big-picture focus can leave you feeling overwhelmed or too focused on the end goal to stick with the little steps it takes to achieve something. Try a variety of creative approaches to stay engaged. Don't lose sight of the meaning behind your goal, either, so you remember that those little steps count. 

Sensing types: Sensing types thrive on practical, step-by-step goals. It’s helpful for you to keep a habit tracker or measure your progress. Set clear benchmarks, engage in a routine and celebrate when you see results.

Step Five: Don’t Expect Perfection

Your plans, goals and progress don’t need to be perfect, so try to avoid a perfectionistic view when working on your mid-year audit. Instead, focus on what you have achieved and can feasibly accomplish. Think of your progress like a profits graph — it should trend upward overall, but that doesn’t mean it won’t dip occasionally. Missing a day or a week doesn’t erase all your progress, so practice self-compassion and let it go when you don’t make progress for a stretch.

To ditch your all-or-nothing thinking, use these phrases when you hit a road bump:

• “This isn’t a failure, I just hit pause.”
• “I’m still learning what works for me and my schedule.”
• “I’ll do better tomorrow.”
• “I’m still making progress, so it’s okay to take a break.”

Remember, it’s okay when things get in the way, too. Sometimes you need a rest, life events derail your day, week or month, or you find a goal isn’t serving you anymore.

A Fresh Start for Mid-Year 

Checking in on your goals is an opportunity to notice the progress you’ve made and get back on track with the goals that have shifted or stalled. Take your tune-up as a time to re-energize yourself and reimagine what the rest of the year will look like. Whether you're building on steady progress on previous goals or starting something new, creating a plan will set you back on track and keep you motivated.

Remember that growth doesn’t happen in a straight line and small pivots, honest check-ins and self-awareness will help you stay consistent over time. Give yourself credit for how far you’ve come (and will come), and know that you can still finish the year strong.