#166| How to Crush the Second Half of Your Year - Without Overwhelm: Overwhelm, Productivity, Time Management & People Pleasing

Are you feeling like 2025 is flying by and wondering why your goals feel so far off—or even forgotten entirely?

This episode is for every overwhelmed working woman who’s ready to check in without shame, ditch unrealistic pressures, and make small, smart shifts to finish the year feeling proud and aligned.

In this episode, you will:

• Discover how to reflect on your year without guilt or overwhelm.
• Learn the power of a monthly check-in and how it can keep you calm and on track.
• Get simple, actionable tips to realign your goals and calendar for the rest of 2025.

Tune in now to learn how to reset your year with ease and start making intentional progress—without doing more.

Featured on the podcast
Ep #51: Create Productivity Without Overwhelm This Week With The "Calendar Clean-Out Method"
Ep #148: Beat Summer Overwhelm with Intentional Time Management 

Wondering why you're overwhelmed? Take my "why am I overwhelmed" quiz to find out the source of your overwhelm, and what to do about it.

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Life can be overwhelming, but on this podcast, you'll discover practical strategies to overcome overwhelm, imposter syndrome, and negative self-talk, manage time effectively, set boundaries, and stay productive in high-stress jobs—all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the Overwhelmed Worki...

Chapters

• 3:08 Celebrating What's Going Well
• 5:01 Assessing What's Not Working
• 7:10 Simple Shifts to Finish Strong

Transcript

Michelle Gauthier: 0:00

Now that we're halfway through the year, are you wondering wait, what happened to all of my goals? You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hi, friend, thanks for joining today. If you are all of a sudden realizing that it is halfway through the year in fact, more than halfway through the year and that you haven't either thought about your goals maybe you never made goals in the first place, or maybe you're making great progress on your goals, you think, but you haven't necessarily checked in with yourself. This episode is going to help you learn how to reflect on the first half of the year without guilt, from a place of what do I want to do for the rest of the year? So we'll look at what's worth letting go or crossing off entirely and what you want to focus on for the rest of 2025. And then I will also give you some quick and easy shifts that you can make to realign and simplify the rest of 2025. Way back in January, which seems like forever ago, I taught a class called your Best Year and, by the way, I teach that class every year in January for several years in a row now. So keep that on your radar for when the new year starts in 2026. But what we do in that is we choose a word of the year, so everybody picks their own word of the year and then we look at high level goals for each area of your life that you want to accomplish, and that can just be it, and participants can go off on their own and see their year through to the end. Or there's an option to join a monthly check in and, if you do opt for that option, every month we review what went well during the month, what didn't go well, what we want to do better for the next month, and then we plan out the next month.

Michelle Gauthier: 2:11

For me personally, when I looked at the end of my 2024, so last year and realized that I really did a great job on all the goals that I had set for myself that year, the reason why is because I did this monthly check-in. If you're checking in on a monthly basis about what you are doing well, things that you need to do better, and planning for the next month ahead. You're never really falling behind or falling off too far that you can't catch up. So that is the thing that I would most recommend is having a monthly check-in with yourself. Now, if you didn't do any planning for 2025, or you did, but you forgot where it is or what you might have had on that, or you did the planning and you're not doing a monthly check in, all is not lost. You are still good to go. So what I want to do today is just talk through how to figure out where you are and then what to shift if you want to finish out the year strong.

Michelle Gauthier: 3:08

So let's first take a look at what's going well so far for you. I will tell you that automatically, your brain may say oh my gosh, nothing. I haven't done anything. I haven't made any progress. That's kind of like the way that our brain likes to trick us. So you might have to challenge yourself and really think about. I know things have gone well, so what are some of those things? Here's a great way to jog your memory: scroll through your calendar or look back at your phone photos.

Michelle Gauthier: 3:33

Sometimes the good stuff gets really buried in the day-to-day and seeing it again can remind you oh yeah, that was really great, that really mattered. Think about all the areas of your life when you're doing this. So what has gone well at work. Remember it can be something really small or it could be something huge, like I finished this million dollar project I was working on, or I feel like I'm communicating better with the people on my team than I was before. Think about family and friendships and your mental health and your physical health and your home and your financial wins, any personal growth or any rest that you've given yourself, any little routines or habits that have stuck. For example, if you're a person who consistently works out, don't forget that that's something that's going well for you. So maybe, like in my case, I added at the beginning of the year, I want to be able to do a pull up. I'm no closer to doing a pull up. In fact, I've barely worked on it. That's one of my gap areas that I have not done well on this year. But let's not lose the fact that I'm going to work out several times a week at my gym. So don't forget about the things that you are doing that are working. These can be related to goals you have or just things that you observed that you really like. For me, I've started trying to do a walk in the afternoon, just a quick one in between clients, and I really like it. So that was not one of my goals for the year, but it's something that I have implemented and I really like it.

Michelle Gauthier: 5:01

Part two is looking at what's not going well. So we want to take a gentle no shame, look at what's not working or what hasn't been working this year. So ask yourself did I start a goal or write it down but never really started? Did I forget about something that I wanted to do? Or am I actually hitting all my goals, but it feels like too much, or it feels overwhelming. Or maybe I didn't set any goals and I'm just floating with no real direction. All of these are totally valid and not a big deal, but now is the time to check in.

Michelle Gauthier: 5:33

So think about what isn't going great for you this year. For example, if your calendar is completely jam-packed but your soul feels empty, it might be time to do a calendar clean out. I've done full episodes on that, which I'll link in the show notes and think about do I really want to still do this? Because you don't need to keep every recurring event from January just because it's still on your books, and it's also totally okay to cross up goals that no longer make sense. I mentioned to you guys that I added the walk, which I really like, and I never really started on the pull-up, and that's just fine with me. It's not quitting, it's being intentional about what you really want to work on. You can also move goals to next year. You can cross it off. You can say I thought I wanted to do this, but I actually don't. That is progress too.

Michelle Gauthier: 6:21

So as I was doing my review for my year, I realized that there were a couple places, when I did this part of what's not going well, where I thought, oh, I had good intentions but I never actually took the steps to make any of that happen. And there were three or four things like that and I didn't want to just put them all on my to-do list for this week, so I'm just going to sprinkle them out over the next. We have like five months left, so I'm just going to sprinkle them out and look at one of them each of the months ongoing and for me, I just put that on my monthly plan for each one of those months, so I remember to do it. So it can be as simple as that. As like, oh yeah, I forgot, I wanted to work on that. Let me see where I can schedule the first step for that project. Okay, so now that you know what is going well, what isn't going well, let's think about what you might want to do differently. Ask yourself, what could I do differently for the rest of this year? That would help me feel good when the year ends. It's probably not like do more or be better. It's probably just do something differently with more intention.

Michelle Gauthier: 7:27

Here are a couple of shifts that you can borrow or choose from or just make your own. Number one is start a weekly planning check-in. If you aren't already doing this and you're not doing like a full planning and calendar clean out on Sundays, it might sound intimidating to do that. If it does just start with 15 minutes of looking at your schedule and maybe jotting down a couple notes. If it feels too big, this is for anything. If it feels too big, then it gets overwhelming and then you do nothing. So if the idea of planning your whole week and spending several hours doing it sounds like whoa, that's way too overwhelming. Just spend 15 minutes just on your phone flipping through your calendar and looking at what you have for the week ahead. Maybe you make a list of your top three priorities, something like that.

Michelle Gauthier: 8:11

Another tip if you are a person who says yes all the time and that's causing trouble for you say let me get back to you, instead of instantly saying yes, it's not all the way to saying no, it's just a start. You could block off 30 minutes a day just for yourself and see what it is you'd like to do during that time. You could try to batch your errands. You could delete a social media platform that you hate anyway. You could ask for help, even if it's small or uncomfortable. I just want to remind you about this one, because a lot of times when we're overachievers, we like to be the ones who people ask for help, but not to ask other people for help. And I have a friend right now and I've been trying to help her with something because she's just having a really busy period in her life and she doesn't want to accept my help, and it helps me remember that when we ask people for help, it also can make them feel good - just reminding you of that. Pick one someday project and actually schedule it.

Michelle Gauthier: 9:15

So this is kind of like I was talking about at the beginning, where if you have something that you wanted to do at the beginning of the year and you just haven't started it, just pick a day on your calendar and it could be two months from now and just jot down and block off an hour for you to think about it or get started on it. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you could just take a weekend off and don't justify it to anyone. You could take the time to forgive yourself and let go of anything that you didn't do this week. I don't really think anybody who's listening to this podcast needs a full overhaul, even if your brain tells you that it does. I think if you look at what's going well for you and you try to lean into that what's not going well for you and you try to make a small shift on one of those things, that it will help. You see that so far this year you probably have been successful more than you would have thought and for the places where you feel like you're behind, you can just get one of those things on your schedule and take one little step.

Michelle Gauthier: 10:12

So that's it for today. Review what went well so far this year, review what isn't going well and come up with one small shift that you can do to finish out your year feeling stronger and better than you feel today. If this episode helped you breathe a little easier, share it with someone else who might need a mid-year reset as well. Anytime you share the podcast, leave a review or leave a rating, which is just where you click the stars. It really helps the podcast continue to grow. I appreciate every single one of you who has done that, shared it, told someone about it. Every single little step like that really makes a difference. I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening to the overwhelmed working woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthiercom. See you next week.