Time for a personal quarterly check up …

So you jumped into the new year with plans to accomplish this, do that, and achieve x, y, and z. With the first quarter of the year now almost in the history books, it’s a good time to examine where you are with all those goals, and assess any changes you may need to make if you really want to accomplish any of them.

If you’re finding yourself derailed from your objectives, it’s likely that you’ve been bargaining along the way. You know, you swore you would accomplish x this year, but as the first few months passed, you bargained away actions you should have been disciplined about for an easier way. It’s likely all you got was an easier day instead, while moving yourself further away from achieving your goal.

We can promise a lot to ourselves and others, but when it comes to living up to what we’ve pledged and actually living it out, we often begin to bargain. That might look something like this classic clip, taken from the movie, “The End.” Check it out, and see how Burt Reynolds tries to negotiate with God …

When we sit down to assess where we’re at with our goals, and realize we’ve bargained away the potential for a good start only to find ourselves failing at the moment, we can become discouraged and start dropping goals and settling for far less than what we were dreaming of.

Let me encourage you not to do that!

The year is still young, you have three full quarters in which you can accomplish a lot. Dropping goals because you find yourself behind on a timetable often is just giving in to not exercising self-discipline and making the tough decisions (the right way, this time). If you just drop some goals but don’t learn to discipline yourself to make things happen, you’ll spend the year shedding your dreams. Instead of doing that, use this time to assess where you went wrong during the first quarter of this year, then pray about and create an action plan for getting back on track so that this year can be as full and productive at the end of the year as you initially hoped it would.

If you’re going to drop anything, get rid of the bargaining and go “all in” on making the changes you need to make to have the year God would like you to have.

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline,” 2 Timothy 1:7.

Scotty