The Catholic Pursuit of Excellence

Try This Simple Weekly Ritual to Stay Focused on Your Big Goals

• Jessica Castillo • Episode 12

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#012 - Ever felt like your busy weeks end with little to show for them? Discover how a simple, yet transformative, weekly ritual can revolutionize your productivity and focus. 

Join me as I share a powerful framework for a weekly review that takes just an hour every Friday. This episode reveals how this practice can help you stay aligned with your goals, celebrate your wins—no matter how small—and identify areas for improvement, ensuring continuous personal growth and fulfillment.

Tune in to learn who can benefit from this structured approach and how to seamlessly incorporate it into your routine, even if consistency has been a challenge. I walk you through each step of the process and how to do it. 

By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear, actionable plan to turn your "busy" weeks into productive milestones. Say goodbye to the blur of activity and hello to tangible progress and strategic planning every week. Don't miss out on making this impactful habit a part of your life.


Are you ready to build high-impact habits of body, mind, and soul that actually stick? Check out the Catholic Path to Excellence today to find out how you can be more consistent in your habits and excel in every aspect of your life.

Feeling "stuck" in your life? Coaching could be the solution you need to break through whatever is holding you back. Book a FREE Call with me today to find out how I can help you.

Speaker 1:

You're listening to the Catholic Pursuit of Excellence, the show that helps you accomplish more, stress less and become the saint God created you to be. I'm your host, life and health coach, jessica Castillo, and this is episode 12. Do you ever get to the end of your week and have no idea where the time went? Most of us are so busy with our day-to-day tasks that the week can zoom by in a blur of frenzied activity, leaving us with the general impression that we had a quote-unquote busy week, while also being unsure of what we actually accomplished. But what if I told you that there was a simple weekly ritual that you could start today that would help you stay more focused on your goals and make tangible progress each week. Even better, it only takes about an hour and you can do it on what tends to be everyone's least motivated day after a long week I'm talking about Friday. What is this powerful ritual? Well, it's a weekly review. In today's episode, I'll share who can benefit from a weekly review, a simple framework that you can use to do an effective weekly review yourself. And, finally, I'll tell you about an easy strategy you can use to virtually guarantee that you'll stick with this practice, even if you've struggled with building the habit of a weekly review in the past, so why would you want to do a weekly review? So why would you want to do a weekly review? Well, a weekly review is perfect for you if you usually start the week without a plan and you find yourself just kind of winging it, or if you feel busy but you haven't made any real progress towards your goals, or if you're the kind of person who just wants to set aside regular time for reflection and self-improvement. A weekly review is also perfect for you if you just happen to be a human being who wants to get more done. So pretty much everybody and if you're listening to this podcast, definitely you. Simply put, a weekly review is the opportunity to reflect on and assess the past week and think strategically about the coming week. There are a lot of methodologies and frameworks that you can use to do a weekly review and really the best one is the one that you'll actually use. That being said, I'm going to share with you the framework that I use with my group coaching clients every Friday to do our weekly review. It's very simple and it takes about 45 minutes to an hour.

Speaker 1:

If you wanted to linger on any of the steps. Okay, the first thing we do is we start with prayer. We thank God for this week. We also ask him to bless this time. This really helps us to ground in and be focused and present, because a lot of times we're coming to a meeting or coming to a session on the heels of something else or there's a lot of chaos around us. It's a busy day. So we just start with prayer to really be able to focus and reflect effectively. We invite the Lord in. Next we focus on what went well this week. You might think about these as your wins, but really this can be anything.

Speaker 1:

The way that I like to do a weekly review is to set a timer for each of the stages or each of the steps of the weekly review is to set a timer for each of the stages or each of the steps of the weekly review. And what I find is, if I set a five minute timer to focus on what went well and what are the wins for the week, what tends to happen is in the first maybe two to three minutes, you'll think of everything obvious and write those things down, and then for the remaining two minutes you kind of have to stretch a little bit, which is kind of a great thing, because what this allows you to do is to think of things that you might not typically consider to be a win as something that went well. This week you might find that you are able to think about and recall things from your personal life, or you know very kind of what you would probably gloss over or think of as insignificant, as things that are actually really good. So this helps ground you in gratitude and also a feeling of achievement as you're starting the weekly review, which is a really good headspace to be in as you start planning and strategizing for the coming week. But the next step of the weekly review is to reflect and focus on what could have gone better. What can you improve for the next week? Now you might think that we go from wins to now doom and gloom and focusing on how you're terrible and all the things that you did not do or that you failed to do. But really, for this section of the weekly review, I advise you to focus on one thing that you can improve for the next week. So maybe you start this section of the weekly review with a little bit of a brainstorm or a mind dump of all of the things that you can kind of think of that you wish had gone a little bit better, or you wanted to improve for the coming week, but then I would really encourage you to just focus on one thing that you can take tangible action on to improve for the next week. So this is not the stage of the weekly review where you just beat yourself up and feel bad about yourself. This is the part of the weekly review where you think about taking leveraged action. Maybe your kids were driving you crazy with snack requests all week and maybe you snapped at them when you didn't mean to. And now, looking forward into the next week, you can think strategically how can you improve this? Is there a system that you can set up in your house that will make it so you're not being driven crazy by snack demands? What leveraged action would you need to take in order to make that happen? So this isn't a doom and gloom beat yourself up section. This is just a hey. I'm acknowledging this didn't go so great, but there's something I can do about it. Now.

Speaker 1:

The next part of the weekly review is where you focus on the status of your current goals and projects. So these might be your quarterly goals and projects. I would recommend probably keeping it at that level. You probably don't need to go as far as looking at your annual goals and projects. That may be a little bit too big. But definitely look at your quarterly goals and projects and just do a quick status check. How are you doing on these goals? Are they on track? Are they off track? Did you forget what they were? Because that happens if we don't review things. This is the bigger picture part of checking your goals and projects.

Speaker 1:

The next step of the weekly review is to zoom in a little bit from your quarterly goals and projects and now focus on what are the goals for the coming week. So you probably don't want to identify more than about three to five goals for the coming week, because you probably can't do more than about three to five goals for the coming week. So, based on your quarterly goals and projects, what are you going to focus on now coming up? This really helps you to stay focused on what's important to you and what you've already identified are your priorities. Because, again, if we do not review our goals and if we don't check in with ourselves regularly, the chances are pretty good that we are going to just get swept away in all of the urgent but not important tasks of our day. The week zooms by and we didn't actually take any significant progress on the things that we meant to be working on.

Speaker 1:

I like to call the next stage of the weekly review the reality check, because this is the part of the weekly review where we schedule our week so based on all of the goals that we set for the coming week. This is when we get out our calendar or our planner, and we actually block in time to work on each of those important goals, and what we might find during this stage of the weekly review is that we were a little too ambitious in setting our goals. This happens frequently. As you start to try to block in time for when you're going to get to these things, you might find your week is a little busier than you thought, and so you might have to adjust your goals, and that's okay. This is just part of the process. As you start scheduling your week, though, what you should feel is a little bit of peace, because now you actually know when you're going to be getting to these things that were important to you as you block in and schedule this time. It really helps you when you're living the day-to-day of your week to not have to ask yourself wait, what was my priority today? What was the thing that I was going to do? You don't need to do that, because you've already figured it out and it only takes a few minutes.

Speaker 1:

The next part of your weekly review will be to update your habit trackers and your any of your routines, like your morning routine, evening routine, maybe you have a midday routine, maybe you have an after school routine. I mean, it's summer at the time of this recording, but there's different routines for different times of your day, and maybe this is a good opportunity for you to update some of those routines. This is also a chance for you to update your ideal weekly schedule. So maybe you found that one of the things you wanted to improve in the last week was your rhythm and routine for meal planning and grocery shopping, and maybe that's something that needs to get updated and changed on your ideal weekly schedule. This is just an opportunity for you to reflect and review how are those habits going? How are your routines going? Is your schedule still fitting your life? This is what allows you to have flexibility in your routines and your schedule, even when things change, because they frequently do. And that's it you.

Speaker 1:

Finally, you close out the weekly review by offering this week to God, thanking him for this time, and that's your whole weekly review. So just in a quick recap. You start with prayer, you focus on what went well this week, you think about what could have been better, what you can focus on at least one thing you can improve. You check on the status of your current goals and projects. You think about what are your goals for the coming week, you schedule your week, you update any of your habit trackers, routines, your ideal weekly schedule, and then you close by offering this week to God. It sounds like a lot, but honestly it only takes about 45 minutes.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but you may have already heard about how great a weekly review can be because, let's be honest, it pretty much is recommended in every personal development, habit formation, productivity book you can imagine. So you've probably already heard about a weekly review if you are interested in productivity and accomplishment and you know, maybe you've already tried to implement this practice in your life already. But chances are good that you probably aren't doing this game-changing practice regularly. And how do. I know that you're probably not doing this regularly. Well, because consistency is really hard, especially when no one is holding you accountable to doing something, and if you feel like you're only letting yourself down. Well, we're all pretty good at letting ourselves down. This is why I've included a weekly review co-working session every Friday in my group coaching program, the Catholic Path to Excellence.

Speaker 1:

Friday in my group coaching program, the Catholic Path to Excellence. So what this means is that each Friday, we meet via Zoom to do a weekly review together. I guide everyone through this simple framework that I just laid out for you, and we all focus and we get it done. Now you can do a weekly review on your own, but I highly encourage you because it's so hard to be consistent and stick with something yourself to have an accountability partner or to do this with someone else. So if you have a team, maybe you do a weekly review with your team. If you're a solopreneur or if you're just, you know you don't have a team or someone to do a weekly review with you might really benefit from joining a group like the Catholic Path to Excellence, where you can do a weekly review every week with a group of people holding you accountable, but holding yourself accountable, and it's really effective. So I did just want to share that.

Speaker 1:

The weekly review is actually only one of the many awesome aspects of the path, which is what I affectionately call this group coaching program. I also include in the path a weekly training and coaching call, where I provide training and coaching on a high impact habit each week on Monday. So we start on Mondays with training and coaching. We end impact habit each week on Monday. So we start on Mondays with training and coaching. We end on Fridays with the weekly review. You have access to an online portal of courses and workshops in 18 different areas of body, mind and soul. You have continuous micro coaching via a private Slack channel. And then every week, I also send out weekly healthy meal plans, recipes and shopping lists, where I will also remind you about checking in on your goals and habits for the week, and then I do provide monthly workout plans. That keeps everyone moving and motivated. I truly and honestly believe that the path includes everything a person needs to build and sustain consistent, high-impact habits, with the added benefit of doing it in a group of really awesome, like-minded Catholics.

Speaker 1:

Now, the reason I'm telling you about all of this now in this episode is that for the next few weeks, I am offering a summer sale on the Catholic Path to Excellence. So normally the program is $197 a month, but if you join before July 31st, I'm offering $100 off each month, so you get access to everything for just $97. If you are interested in learning more about the path and taking advantage of this sale, you can go to thrivingcatholiccom forward slash path or you can just click the link for the show notes in this episode. So just a quick recap. The weekly review is such a powerful practice. It's something that is going to help you stay focused on your goals, keep taking action, stay productive each week and if you're looking for an awesome group to do it with, I encourage you to join us in the Catholic Path to Excellence. All right, that's it for me this week. Until next time, remember that it is Jesus who inspires you to do something great with your life, so don't let yourself be ground down by mediocrity. Bye for now.