Goal Setting for People Who Hate Goals

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Do you have a sneaking suspicion that goal setting doesn’t really work for you, especially when it comes to your writing? You’re not alone. In this age of self help and positive thinking, a lot of us feel more burdened by our failures than ever—if not outright annoyed. But there are ways to set goals that can help you better define your purpose, give you a sense of direction, and leave you open enough and flexible to keep the creative juices flowing. Here are a few tips. After reading, feel free to share your thoughts and your own goals for our upcoming January writing challenge in the comments below.

• Avoid goals based on what you think you should do instead of your own ambitions. Writing in itself can be a rebellion against those shoulds: I should make money, I should be productive, I need to have something to show for my efforts. Instead, maybe you want to get that story or novel out because its bursting like a fever-dream in your head and you want to share that other people.

• Focus on the process of the goal and the experience you want to have along the way instead of the outcome itself. As a writer, this might mean paying attention to the meditative writing habit that allows you to disappear into your creative cave, a place that is wholly you own and where you get to make all the rules of the world you’re trying to build.

• Visualize both on the positive outcomes and also the negatives of the here-and-now that you’d like to change. Start simple if you need to: Do you feel itchy about not getting more writing done? Wouldn’t you love that itchiness to go away?

• Choose ambitious, concrete goals more than vague and easy ones that leave you with less a sense of accomplishment. Your goals should challenge you, not simply be steps you’d be making anyway.

• Lean into learning how to complete your task from others, discovering other tools and strategies for moving ahead in case you hit a road block. Craft books and reading as much as possible in your genre are great teachers. So are your fellow writers in the trenches. Share your process and the road blocks you’re hitting along the way and give them a space to share theirs, along with the tricks and tools they’ve used to overcome them. (Hint: that’s why we’re doing this month’s challenge.)

• Use goals as a guide to give you a sense of direction, not as a a narrowly-conceived destination. Stay open to the book or story as it is becoming on the page and allow yourself the flexibility to change gears if you get a sense that something isn’t working. 

• Question your motivations: Why do you want to meet your goal? What experience or feeling are you looking for? Allow your answers to these questions to show you the path ahead, even if it happens to change somewhat day by day. The feeling will likely remain the same.

(For the latest research about goals, read this BBC article.)

This January, my own goals are to finish a draft of a book I’ve long been suffering over (no more suffering! sense of completing a full imagined world!) and dive back into an old novel that I’d like to revise, setting myself a path ahead for how to get that done. Challenging, yes, but these also give me a sense of having my feet on the ground.

What are yours? Or kind of thinking about goals (or your project) are you trying to avoid? Feel free to share in the comments.

Photo by Dave Ruck on Unsplash