Everyone can experience a Gap year, at any age and a lot of people might have experienced a gap in their momentum this year.

What’s a Gap Year? A Gap Year is a period of time (usually a year, but could be shorter) taken either before or after university education, to expand one’s horizons, typically by extensive travel and cross-cultural experiences. Put simply a Gap Year is a pause between two seasons.

Although a Gap Year is usually referenced in the context of University studies, I believe the concept applies throughout our lives and could happen at any age. The critical distinction is this: For the year (or period of time) to be a Gap Year, it must fall between “what I just finished/was doing” and “then after I’ll be doing…”. The Gap Year is intrinsically linked to vision. Unless I know what I’ll be doing “after” the Gap Year, it’s not really a Gap Year, is it?

Let’s talk vision for a moment. Vision is a picture of your life purpose fulfilled, future self, expressed in a number of goals, over a period of time. What I would like you to focus on is that vision is a picture of your “goals” clarified.

I maintain a few lists of goals that I reflect on regularly and update once a year, on my birthday. It starts with a Life Time list of goals, which reflect my “life purpose fulfilled”. The next list is my 10-year list, then a 7-year list, then a 4-year list and lastly my “this year list”. The rationale behind this system is to come up firstly with the Life Time list of goals and to then move some to the 10-year list. From the 10-year list, moving some to the next list and so on, until you have the “this year list” of goals.

You can set up your own breakdown of the lists and have one for each year if you like. Really depends on your own circumstances and age. When I was younger, I had a 5-year gap between lists, but also because I was still working out what my Life Time list would look like. Bottom line is your bookends are a “Life Time list” and a “this year list”. I’m still adding goals to my Life Time list.

So how does this relate to a Gap year? Currently the world is navigating through a medical pandemic that has led to loss of life, halted global travel, closed businesses and forced those businesses which didn’t close down to completely rethink how they operate. The interesting thing is that this pandemic hit at the start of 2020, the beginning of a new decade. Ironically this was set to be the year of vision, 20-20 vision (medical term) and then the pandemic hit, wiping whatever plans the world had.

How did this pandemic impact you? Did you have plans to expand your business, to travel overseas or studying in another country? Did you have to self-isolate, working from home or lost a job? All of a sudden what seemed secure was now shaken. New decade resolutions on pause or cancelled and we find that 2020 unexpectedly became a Gap year.  The irony extended to the cancelation of global travel, which is normally the hallmark of a Gap year.

When we are faced with the unexpected, that put an enduring pause on our plans, we need to decide which side of our Gap year we will focus on. We could go through it like taking a ride on a passenger train, adopting its momentum and simply accepting that our goals are on pause, day dreaming of what it will be like when things returns to normal. Or we could visualize ourselves standing on the other side of our Gap year and consider how we could “progress all Goals” (paG) during our Gap year.  The “paG” acronym is “Gap” spelled in reverse if you didn’t notice.

So how do we progress all our goals? During this pandemic I started my next postgraduate course, renovated a home, sold another home, expanded my investment portfolio, taught my teenage son how to invest in shares, to name a few. I bought a book I wanted to read (the buying part is the progress, reading it is the next step). Sure my travel goals are on pause, but that doesn’t mean I can’t research the intended trips (progress). What goals are on your next year list or even 1 to 5-year list that you could progress? You may not be able to complete the goal, but what measurable step can you take today towards progressing it?

It all starts with vision and articulating your goals across different time milestones.  Fixing our gaze on the future, let us to see past the present pause and helping us to identify the goals we can progress. The pause could actually provide us with the margin to progress goals that might have otherwise lived on a list until years into the future. Sharing our vision and demonstrating how we progress our goals to our loved ones and friends might just inspire them to do the same.  Embrace the Gap to Progress All Goals.