Mid-year goals

My goal setting bench in Cascais, Portugal.

I'm a goal-setting kind of guy. If you don't believe me just ask my wife. Each year for our wedding anniversary I'll take my wife out to dinner and we use this time to talk about our goals -- for each other and for each of our four children. Besides this routine goal-setting time, I'm always thinking about what goals should be accomplished.

This spring, while on a trip to Portugal, I found myself walking through the Parque Marechal Carmona one evening. It was a really beautiful park and I had the place to myself. So, I sat down on this park bench and started writing down a long list of goals that I wanted to accomplish.

I always write my goals in four areas: Spiritual goals, Mental goals, Social goals and Physical goals. I find that when I focus on these four areas I can usually capture the bulk of what I need to work on.

The secret, I've found, is to regularly review your goals and make weekly plans to move them along. I know...it 's really hard to work on them all of the time...so you have to plan on being flexible. I try to find a quite place each week to read my goals. It could be at lunch, on a Sunday morning, or on a plane ride. But the important thing is to keep them in the front of your mind all of the time!

So, here we are at the middle of the year -- July 1. If you haven't been able to keep up on your New Year's resolutions, try dusting them out today and make a Mid-Year Resolution to refocus on them and accomplish them during the next six months.