Raise your hand if you get SUPER excited on the first day of the month!

(Just me? Yeah… That’s kind of what I figured).

But that’s exactly why I wanted to write this post! The beginning of the month is a very, very important time in your life that should not be taken lightly – the start of a new month provides a wonderful opportunity to hit “reset” and get seriously motivated to make things happen. There’s no better time than the first day of the month to hit “reset,” intentionally realign yourself, reconnect with who you are, and set meaningful goals for the month ahead.

If you want to start living a seriously fulfilling life, you need to level up the way you approach each month. To help you do this, I’m sharing three things you MUST start doing on the first day of each month.

1. Look back and reflect

Step one, look back and reflect. Look back on the month that just happened. For example, it’s September 1st, look back on your August: How was August for you? What was great about it? What are you proud of? Did you accomplish something huge in August? Was it a milestone month for some reason? Did you reach a big goal or did something unexpected happen?

This is so important. It’s so important to look back on where you came from, and acknowledge and learn from things that happened, whether they were things that you had direct control over, or things that maybe you did not. Reflect, and take stock of where you’re at and how you’re feeling.

In addition, the end of the month is a great time to look back and reflect on things that you’re grateful for. You guys know that I’m a huge, huge, huge proponent of gratitude and the end of the month is a great time to look back and to think about all the AWESOME things that happened that you are grateful for. And it’s funny because when you start to list out these awesome occurrences, you’ll find that more and more memories appear – the more you practice gratitude, the more you’ll realize all that you have to be grateful FOR. It’s almost like the best kind of self-fulfilling prophesy!

Also – I encourage you to go through this step of looking back and reflecting on the previous month in writing. Sit down, journal, and list it out: What was great for me last month? What was awesome in that last month? What are the things that I’m proud of? What am I happy about? What am I grateful for?

Because it’s worth acknowledging and dwelling on these moments. We spend so much of our lives in hyper-speed mode and going super fast. So why not sit down at the end of each month and take stock of where you are, where you came from, what happened, and what’s currently going on in your life. And just sit with that for a little bit. This practice of reflecting and connecting will do wonders for your mindfulness and peace – trust me!

2. Look forward and dream

After you’ve looked back on the previous month, the next step is to look forward and dream. What do you want to accomplish in this coming month? And if your answer right now is, “I don’t know, I guess same thing that I always do….” then I’m going to challenge you to really think about that.

Use the previous month as a benchmark for you. Think about things that happened, and then think about things that you want to change moving forward into the next month. What would you like to improve on? What would you like to get rid of? What would you like to create? What would you like to finally check off your list? Just spend some time thinking about it and allow yourself that space to dream.

Pausing and taking time to think about what you want is really the first step to creating a passionate, purposeful, meaningful life of your design. What do I want my next month to look like? What do I want my LIFE to look like? Because if there’s one thing that I want you to take away from this blog post: it’s that it is your choice. It is your choice to determine how you want your coming month to unfold for you, and the best way to do that is by thinking about it and thinking about exactly what it is that you want to happen in this coming month.

If you could imagine an ideal month for yourself, what does that look like? What’s included in that? If it’s fall, is it full of pumpkin spice lattes and plaid and all that great stuff? (Because I know for me it is!) If its spring, is it filled with flowers? Summer? Time at the beach? Winter? Build a snowman?

I want you to think about truly meaningful things that you can make happen in this next month. What are those things? Think about it. Whether it’s goals or developments in your personal life, in your business, in your career, in your health and fitness, in your spirituality, in your hobbies or just like something that you’ve been really working on for a while, just think about it and think about what could happen this month to make it a perfect, perfect month for you. Dream BIG.

3. Make tangible monthly goals

The final step that you should be doing on the first day of each month is setting monthly goals. So to recap:

Step 1: Look back and reflect.

Step 2: Look forward and dream.

Step 3: Set tangible monthly goals.

So all that stuff that you were thinking about in Step 2 – all that “pie in the sky,” I want to finally run a marathon and I want to finish that book and I want to get a new job. Take those BIG dreams, and bring them down to reality, and set actual tangible monthly goals.

This is one of my favorite things to do and one of my favorite things to help people with and it’s so, so, so important. Yes, you need to think about what you want your life to look like – that is step one of creating a meaningful, beautiful, passionate, purposeful existence. But without goals, how will you know if you’re progressing towards that?

For a complete step-by-step guide of how to set meaningful monthly goals, check out my blog post: How to Set Monthly Goals.

Monthly Ritual Wrap-Up

Here’s the progression that I want you to keep in mind, okay?

Dreams lead to goals, from goals you make your plan, your plan leads to action, and action leads to joy and fulfillment.

So if right now in the cadence of your life, you’re not taking time at the end of every month to go through this exercise that we just talked about (looking back and reflecting, and looking forward and dreaming about what you want to happen in the next month, and then putting a tangible plan on paper of how you’re going to make that thing happen…) then you are severely missing out, my friend! Because this alone can add so much more day-to-day, month-to-month fulfillment and joy, and so much more meaning to your life.

I encourage you to go through those three steps. If you really want to start living a beautiful, meaningful, purposeful life, this is what you NEED to do at the end of every month. Keep the past in mind, but don’t dwell on it so much that it prevents you from creating a beautiful new month of your perfect vision for yourself.

Personally, I love the end of the month – that beautiful season at the end of one month and the start of another – because it really is an opportunity. An opportunity for you to reset and dive forward into a new month with all that vigor and excitement and joy and potential. There’s so much potential for what can happen in a new month, and step one to making that potential not just a dream but a reality is to set tangible goals that will help you achieve that potential if you complete them.

Want to hear me (very animatedly) talk about this first-day-of-the-month habit? Check out my Facebook video here!