What do you do when you set yourself a writing goal and fail to reach it?
There is plenty of advice on goal setting out there today. I have written my own eBook on that very subject which you might find useful in this situation. “The 5 Secrets of Successful Goal Setting” gives you five essential steps to make sure you get to where you want to be.
But what if you did fail? What then? Does that mean you set your goals wrong to begin with?
Do you have a goal to aim for in your writing career?
Firstly let’s understand one important thing. You need to understand that setting goals is a very important thing to do as a writer. Indeed, if you don’t set yourself worthwhile goals you might find you don’t achieve anything much at all. Your goals stay as dreams, and you don’t get anywhere when it comes to reaching them.
What you need to remember is that it doesn’t matter if you set a goal for your writing and fail to reach it. It could be that you set yourself too large a goal to reach in that time period anyway. Or it could be that you didn’t prepare properly to reach it. In any event you will usually find that you achieve more and get closer to your goal than you would have done if you hadn’t tried to get there in the first place.
As you become more attuned to the process of setting goals you will find that you get better at achieving them. In turn that will lead you to be more positive about setting new goals and reaching those as well. The very process of setting those early goals is laying the foundations of your future writing career.
Make sure your first few goals for your writing career are small if you can. That makes them easier to achieve and you will build up your confidence levels and experience much more easily as a result. You will then find yourself setting bigger and better goals and working towards an even better writing career too.
If on the other hand you were to give up and not set yourself any goals at all, well… you would still be at the dreaming stage. So it is up to you. If you set a goal for your writing career and fail, you have two choices. You can either go back to dreaming and stay there, or you can press on, learn from your failure and get closer to success next time.
I know which one I would choose. How about you?
Original Articles. Constant-Content.
I have several goals I succeed at every day, there are also others that I fail at constantly. I’m still working out the kinks in my working day, but as long as I am still reaching towards my ultimate goal (earn a living as an online freelance writer) I don’t think of those yet-to-be-reached-goals as failures. Meeting a clients deadline is not a goal… that’s a must!
Yes that is an excellent point to make. Perhaps we shouldn’t think of meeting clients’ deadlines as goals, because of course they must be achieved, as you so rightly say. But goal setting is a good way of making sure you keep an eye on what you want to achieve, both in the short and long term. Even if you fail at some of them, you can still succeed at others.