Goal Setting Archives - Page 2 of 2

Meh. I reached my goals: the truth about setting goals

I met my goal, and I am not ok with it.

I love December because I can look back on my goals and the way I spent my year. Then I can celebrate the victories and plan for changes to what I wasn’t celebrating so much. In a future post I will share my celebrations. This post is about what I want to change because I ~~met~~ crushed my goals, and I am not ok with it.

For the last five years I have set reading goals through Goodreads. Every year I bump up the number of books a little more. Some years I do a reading challenge to try to expand my reading list. I scour lists of Best Reads to add to my To Be Read list and try to keep up with what everyone else had read and loved. Then at the end of the year, Goodreads summarizes the number of books and pages I have completed this year.

2018 reading goals — Last year I **started** 188 books, but **finished** 163 books. I keep a separate list of books I abandoned so I don’t accidentally try them again. More on that in this post.

There are a couple reasons why I am not excited about crushing this goal. While reading may not be your thing, I wonder if some of these reasons will resonate with how you are feeling about your goals. Don’t just consider the goals you hit – maybe you sabotaged your goals because you saw some of this sooner than I did. Either way, I want to talk about a different way to think about goal-setting, or the lack thereof. Let’s dig into it.

1 – Now I have to raise the goal

We are all familiar with the idea of fear of failure. Most likely we are experienced at fear of failure. That cold clammy feeling when we think about everyone we are letting down when we cannot come through on the expectation or promise. But what about its wicked step-sister, Fear of Success.

The idea behind fear of success is that when we reach a goal we have to immediately keep improving. I was a varsity athlete in college. At the end of my freshman year I was handed a list of goals I was to reach before returning to campus in the fall.

A certain time for the mile run.
A number to hit for body weight and a more strict number for body fat.
Several targets for lifts in the weight room (bench press, squat, etc.).

I worked my ass off that summer. Before going to my maintenance crew job, I lifted every day at 5:00 am. I got off at 3:30 pm and played basketball or ran or both until 8:00 pm more days than not. Weekends were filled with various tournaments or working a second job in a sporting goods store. I carefully planned meals and ditched my favorite Dairy Queen M&M Blizzards. Alcohol was not even an option.

I returned to campus, crushed all of my goals. OK, not the mile time – I squeaked by on that bad boy. But I reached it. To this day I still remember how proud of myself I was that fall.

I met with my coach at the end of the pre-season expecting celebrations. Instead I hear: Good, now we know what you are capable of so we can set some real goals.

That summer schedule took everything I had. And it was deemed not “real goals.” Crushing my goals crushed me. I had an intense schedule that I could barely sustain and now I was asked to significantly add to it.

Now, upping my reading game is not as soul crushing as sitting in that office hearing about my “good start,” but as I was looking ahead to my 2020 reading goals I started getting that familiar voice in my head.

What will I give up to make this happen?
How will I fit it all in?
What can I drop off the life schedule to get this done?

Its READING, guys! I refuse to let one of my favorite things in the world become something that squeezes out life. I will not be bumping up 2020 expectations just because I hit my 2019 goal.

But there is another reason I am not increasing my goal.

2019 reading goals — This year I **started** 168 books, but **finished** 143 books.

2 – What does this goal cost me?

If we return to our Young Susan basketball player analogy, it becomes clear what I exchanged. When I was a sophomore my boyfriend was so mad that I missed him playing baseball in semi-state playoffs that he cheated on me with one of my biggest rivals from our school’s biggest opponent, then dumped me while I was playing in a national tournament. Then my senior year I skipped all graduation parties and many friends’ open houses to travel to tournaments out of state.

It may not seem like a big deal now, but to a teenage girl it was devastating.

The parallel for me now is what am I not doing so that I can read for the sake of raising my goal. And this one was the clencher for me. When I read I am in the zone. Checked. Out. I am in Three Pines. Or playing Quidditch. I am right there with the gone girl on the train in the window.

What I am not doing is:

Connecting with my people
Crafting something of my own
Writing words that might resonate with you
Engaging with nature to restore my own soul

I have decided I am not ok with this trade. While it may seem productive – read more, nature will always be there! It is not sustainably productive. I cannot maintain this every increasing number while abandoning other interests and passions.

For a couple years I have needed to check out and numb to difficulties to get through a rough patch, but I feel myself coming out of that and into a new season. Reading is not going to go away AT ALL. Now reading will find its right sized place for this new phase of life for me. It is going to get to become a hobby that is sustainably productive instead of a competitive obsession that I have to hard charge forward with, consequences of what I am leaving behind be damned!

Do you have a goal that just feels tiring to keep expanding on? What would it feel like to maintain, reduce, or even abandoned it? What if you deemed yourself good enough – just as you are today?

By Susan Sanders|2020-06-17T17:16:05-04:00December 30th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

The Dream

I have wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember. In elementary school there was a Young Author’s contest. Let me tell you about the blood, sweat, and tears that went into my submission. Pete the Pencil was a MASTERPIECE. It had humor, alliteration, and illustrations. It had a story line of Pete’s ongoing shenanigans. It had a Gillian Flynn-esque twist (spoiler alert – PETE WAS KILLED) and the ensuing chaos.

I have no idea who won, if I won, if anyone even mentioned liking it. What I do remember is creating it. Cutting the paper and choosing the artistic “sideways” (i.e. landscape) layout. Laboring over the illustrations with my box of 32 crayons cursing the fact I did not have the pimped out 64-count box with the sharpener. Rough drafts on paper so I would not mess up the illustrations with misspelled words, updated storylines (that crafty Pete was always throwing me a curve ball), or janky 8 year old handwriting. I still feel the heart swell and stomach drop of placing the finished masterpiece on my teacher’s desk. It is how I anticipate leaving The Girl at college will be next year.

I kept writing in high school. For the school paper, for the yearbook. In pages-long heart wrenching missives to my closest friend and boys who broke my heart. It was before the time of email, social media and apps that make all that heartache disappear 15 seconds after opening the message. Thank God, because those were also masterpieces. Artistic works of teenage heartbreak. How do I know? I also wrote drafts of those, many of which I found in notebooks years later when my parents moved and started turning over boxes of “treasures.” I am sure you have some of these boxes too – baby teeth, a Cabbage Patch kid, teenage heartbreak letters and dried Homecoming flowers. Oh the angst packed into a sturdy Jim Beam box!

dried flowers — Source: The Dried Flower Shop

As part of my career I have written newsletter articles, technical instructions, and corporate C-level communications. I like words. I love words! And I always wanted to share my words with others. The list of people I had shared this goal with was very short: my sister and my husband. At one point I let a co-worker friend in on this secret goal I had to write a book. But that was about it. No plans. No actions.

The Lies

It was easy to put off inquires from Bixby. I would be lamenting the lack of creative pursuits in my life and he would supportively ask, “What about writing? You want to write a book – how is that coming along? How can we make that happen for you?”

And oh, reader I would tell him how that was happening, yes I would. I would explain that after I did EVERYTHING for him and the kids ALL DAY LONG and repeated the process EVERY SINGLE DAY, the last thing I had energy for was to think about writing a book. Perhaps if I had HELP around here, I would have realized my lifelong dream a LONG TIME AGO. They were crushing my dreams.

Ahem. The memory of this is so uncomfortable I want to scoot my chair away from myself.

It is so easy to blame other people for where we fall short. To hide behind our martyrdom. To use excuses that are not even true as the reasons we have not braved being vulnerable and pursuing dreams and goals. I mean real talk – let’s debunk these lies I was telling about My People blocking my book writing.

Lie #1 – I did EVERYTHING

False. Paul cooks dinner, I don’t. He walks the dog every morning, sometimes I tag along.

Lie #2 – ALL DAY LONG

False. I go to bed before everyone else so Paul often fields homework, signature, and crazy last minute requests. The kids are teenagers so the truth is they rarely come out of their rooms so there is no risk of them needing anything all day long.

Lie #3 – EVERY SINGLE DAY

False. We share custody of the kids so they are not even in our house EVERY day.

Hyperbole so easily aids in the drama and fear. And that drama and fear keeps us in our ruts and patterns. Then a decade goes by and nothing has happened. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

The Truth

I left the job where I worked with the person that held my authorship secret goal, and we recently connected over lunch to catch up. I was carrying on about wanting more, desiring creativity – I wanted to write a book even!

“Yes!” she said, “I remember you saying that 10 years ago.”

Ooof. She did not mean it unkindly, she is Candadian – they are never unkind. But she is a truth teller. And boy I needed to hear that truth. It was definitely kinder than my high school basketball coach’s “encouragement” when I was indecisive: “Shit or get off the pot, Susan!” But it still packed a punch.

Julie’s words have haunted me since. Haunted me into action. Since that fateful chat, I have:

Started this blog
Written about things more personal than someone else’s mediocre book.
Put up money to join an online writing community
Scheduled writing days into the calendar and honored that writing time

Time is going to pass whether I am writing or not. Am I willing to let another 10 years go by having a desire out there and not fill it? No, I am not.

What about you? What goals are you sitting with? Do you have a truth teller in your camp that can help you get moving? Why do you think you have not taken the first step?