It’s time to get in gear because September is the beginning of the all new you.
Wait. You check your calendar. January is four months away. September is just another month. You’re done with school, so why should you think about September as a transition time?
Why not? Why should we wait until January to check in on our past goals and make new ones? January is still months away. In those months we can accomplish a lot. September is a great time to check in with our goals and see how far we’ve come and how much we have to to do.
Even if we don’t have to go back to school, that doesn’t give us a free pass from learning and developing in all areas of our life. September, with its changing of the seasons, is the perfect time to realize all of the possibilities of how we can change — and improve — many areas of our lives.
The key areas are broken out below. Here are the questions to ask yourself in order to calibrate how far you’ve come in each area and to decide what goals you can set for the future you.
Personal
Personal goals are all about you. How do you see yourself improving? Be selfish. Find skills you’d like to improve in from different areas, whether it is writing, learning about finance,or learning how to do a proper pull-up. Each skill you acquire adds to your personal portfolio until you have a diverse mix of skills to utilize in many different areas. You can think of it like a stock portfolio: each skill is a stock and the goal is to acquire many “stocks” as you can to create a diverse portfolio of you.
What are your stocks? What do you consider the “pillars of me”? — What are the themes of you that you’d like to develop?
Read: Choose Yourself by James Altucher – Read about how choosing to prioritize yourself is the best decision of your life.
You are a badass by Jen Sincero – Sometimes we all need a kick in the pants to remind ourselves how great we are.
Career
How is your career progressing? Maybe you made goals for your next review. It’s time to check in on those goals and to see how you’re tracking toward them. Do you have new goals? It’s one thing to work toward the goals your company has set for you, but what about the goals you have set for yourself? Sometimes it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the goals that will further your own career. No one is looking out for you, so look out for yourself.
What about starting a side hustle in your free time so you’re not so dependent on your job as your sole income?
Read: Side Hustle school by Chris Guillebeau – Follow this step by step guide to execute a side hustle in less than a month.
Read: Crucial Conversations by Kerry Petterson and Joseph Grenny – Make it a goal to have some tough conversations at work and to do them more seamlessly so you have better communication at work .
Family/Friends
Your friends have a huge impact on your health and happiness. So why not find ways to strengthen the relationships that have a positive impact on your life? How can you connect with them in a deeper, more meaningful way? Make a list of target people you’d like to reach out to and meet up with them for coffees, lunches or happy hours. Make a goal to make at least one social date a week: the more we see people the happier we are.
Also, think if there are any friends who bring you down so you can think about spending less time with them. You don’t need that bad juju. Only surround yourself with the good stuff of good friends.
Read: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie – how to improve relationships and be likeable and unforgettable, even with strangers.
Relationships
If you are in a relationship, have you let it go stale? Have you had meaningful time hanging out with your partner and spent some quality time together or have you been too busy to notice? Do something romantic for each other to regain a connection. Make a goal for more time together, more dinners at home or more date nights. Start small and you could see big results in how you and your partner connect.
If you’re not in a relationship, take stock in what you’d like out of a relationship and make a list of goals for who you’d like to meet and how. Are you interested in meeting someone? What about joining a running club or a social meetup so you can start meeting more folks face to face. You never know where you might meet someone great, but by meeting more people in different ways you increase your chances.
Read: The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman – learn what makes your partner tick. Take the test so you know how to start speaking each other’s love language.
Read: The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin – each person falls into one of these four categories, and finding out which tendency can really help how you communicate with your partner.
Money
Where are you tracking against your money goals? Set some new goals for the upcoming year. Would you like to buy a house this year? Would you like to start a retirement account? Would you like to start saving a certain amount of money each month? Take a look at the last few months of spending to see where you can trim. Go on a spending diet in the fall if you’ve been spending too much to make it a game. Wherever you are starting on your money goals is a good place to start – so long as you actually start.
Read: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki – This is an oldie but goodie about how to look at wealth and it might change your perspective for how you can start making money too.
Read: The Millionaire Next Door – by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko – What lessons could we learn from millionaires? You might be surprised how they live and how they keep their millions.