I am writing this blog post at the end of June 2020. Wow! We are already half-way through the year. Time flies! This is an opportune time to reflect on goal setting 2020. Especially since this is no ordinary year and everything has changed drastically in the last 6 months. If you think back to January 2020 and your new year’s resolutions and plans. That seems like a decade ago by now! No matter where you are reading this in the world our lives have all been affected by Covid 19. The effects of the pandemic really took off in March when much of the world went into lock-down including in Ireland, where I live. Schools, colleges, businesses etc. shut and we were told to stay at home. We all learned new skills such as how to use Zoom!

Nature is in control

By the end of June the lock-down has eased considerably here and businesses are starting to reopen. Our infection rates are now low and the virus has been largely suppressed for the moment. However as we are seeing now in other parts of the world there is an ever present danger of a resurgence of the virus. We have all learned that the futures is uncertain. The best made plans from the new year and goal setting 2020 in January went out the window. Nature is really in control after-all. Therefore we have no option but to re-plan and go with the flow. Nobody knows what the next 6 months will bring. Will schools and colleges reopen in the autumn? How many businesses will never re-open? How many people will have no jobs to go back to? So many questions and so much uncertainty.

Impacts in poorer countries

In poorer countries I am especially conscious of the impact of the pandemic where there are little in the way of government supports. Livelihoods have been badly impacted. People are suffering. To take one specific example the Malala Fund estimates that 10 million girls might never go back to school after the crisis. Out of school they are vulnerable to teenage pregnancy, child marriage, abuse, child labour etc. The Malala fund made this calculation based on what happened in countries like Sierra Leone when schools closed due to Ebola. Ten million girls losing an education and all the negative consequences of that into the future. The sad part will be that the resultant poverty will be passed on to a new generation – their children. These are some of the real long-lasting and very negative consequences of this crisis.

The second half of 2020?

This is a good time to start thinking of goal setting 2020 and the remaining 6 months. What do you want to have achieved by the end of the year? Six months is a long time (especially the last 6 months!) and you can transform your life is so many ways by December 2020. However its hard to know what the world will look like by December. We are in uncertain times. However you can decide how each of your days will look like. You can set input goals. For example you can set an input goal to learn the guitar or learn Spanish (two of mine :-)). At this uncertain time we don’t have to focus so much on results (Output and Outcome goals). I cover all these types of goals in my new goal setting course.

Mind Movie

One of the things I am working on right now is to transform my own life’s purpose, vision and key goals into a mind movie which I watch at least once per day. A mind movie is a fun way to keep your goals front and centre in both your concious and sub-concious minds. I have included the current version of my own mind movie below. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own! In the next two weeks I am actually working through my own Goal Setting 101 course as a student to plan the next 6 months of the year. The course contains some wonderful exercises to help me get clear on what I am about and what I want to achieve. I am proud of my own course when I take it from the student perspective! Goal setting and planning are topics we must constantly come back to throughout our lives. As we have seen the world will change around us whether we want change or not. It’s better to be in the driving seat of your own change rather than have change just happen to/be forced on you.

Best wishes, Tom

PS Check out my Goal Setting 101 Course for more ideas. You can watch the free preview video and there is a 30 day money back guarantee so you cannot lose!