Mid-Year Career & Life Reflection

You’ve officially made it through the first half of 2024! You’re continuing to grow even when it doesn’t seem like it. As time both personally and professionally continues to fly by, make sure to take a quick break, reflect on your positive and growth moments from 2024 thus far, and get ready to continue down your road to 2024 success!

As you reflect on what’s gone well and what you’ve been challenged with so far this year, I wanted to offer three tips that will help you to ensure you’re embracing the best version of yourself each day!

1. Stop & Smell the Roses – Turn off your devices, put away your books, and pause to remember your “why”. Your why is the reason you get up each day, serve others, take care of your home family and work family, along with supporting your goals from year to year. Take a moment to determine what fueled your success and what held you back over the past few months. You’ll find even more benefit by journaling your progress so you can clear a lot of those thoughts from your head, and you’ll be able to track your wins the rest of the way.

2. Gather Feedback – Feedback (both personally & professionally) has helped me grow the most in my career and gathering this feedback from the important people in your life can fuel your hard work going forward and help you to determine how you can grow, even when the feedback isn’t the most well received. Avoid taking any feedback personal and if you’re receiving personal/professional feedback, take it with a grain of salt as you know yourself the best overall. My feedback philosophy is to always embrace the feedback, ask for specific examples, determine what you agree and don’t agree with, and then plot out how you’ll work to get better each time. Feedback in life is so important and I have so many stories I can share (in a future blog post) where I heard personal and professional feedback from my home team (wife & children) and my away team (work manager, co-workers) that helped me improve in more ways than one. Treat feedback as a gift and you’ll enjoy the benefits that come with feedback each and every time!

3. Rest & Recover – Year by year, as hard as I try to rest and contain my energy throughout the year, right around this time of year (July), I feel the hints and flickers of burnout. If you can find time in a week to take a rest half day or day, I promise it will be worth it, even if your work/email continues to pile up. Your mind will get a well deserved break and will come back even stronger. My challenge to you as well is to start planning for how you’ll use the rest of your vacation days by December 31st. Using these days doesn’t even have to be a full blown vacation, it can be something as simple as a staycation, a no device hiking day, or playing a round of golf with friends. Take care of yourself and your body will in turn reward you!

I hope these three tips have helped you to embrace positive momentum in your life and will make lasting habits for you to check in with yourself every few months.

You all are amazing and I’m honored to be able to bring career, soft, and life skills your way periodically.

Keep growing and know that I truly believe in you!

Ryan