What happens when you don’t meet your creative goals?
We all have goals. Some of us like to plan them meticulously, outlining steps and milestones; some of us put them on our vision board and let our intuition guide us. But, in the planning stage, we don’t always think about what happens when we don’t reach them.
It’s fun and inspiring to post about what our goals are each month or quarter, and even more fun when we get to post that we’ve achieved our goals. But I don’t see a lot of posts about what the other side of that coin is — the not achieving.
If you like, I have a worksheet you can download here that goes hand in hand with this blog post.
Not achieving our goals
I’ve had a lot of goals the last couple of years. Some of them I’ve achieved, some of them (most of them, to be honest) I haven’t. And I’m the first one to put my hand up and say I’m guilty of not owning up to not reaching my goals as easily as I do to reaching them.
It’s a sticky feeling; shame, disappointment, fear of never being enough.
I’ve had one goal in particular I’ve been working on for close to two years. If you follow me and some of my friends on Instagram, you’ve probably even heard about it: Pathway to Published (PTP), an online course designed to help clear the confusion surrounding the publishing and online business journey for new authors.
This project has been my baby. I’ve set numerous launch dates, and even more dates for having completed the content. In fact, I was supposed to be launching it this week. Instead, I’m writing this post. It’s a bit of a bitter pill to swallow.
I could simply move the launch date back again, re-jig my plan for completing the content, and essentially move the goal-posts for myself again and not talk about it for strangers to read on the internet.
But, this time, I want to sit in this discomfort and truly examine why I haven’t achieved this goal yet. I know for a fact that I’m not the only one who has never reached an important goal and I feel like a little reflection might help me — and possibly anyone reading this — to set more realistic and ... dare I say … flexible goals in the future.
In the interest of encouraging a zero shame approach, and being completely transparent about my creative process, I’ve included a timeline of this project since its conception so you can see how consistently I haven’t crossed the finish line.
But – this article is not just about me. Do you have a goal that you’ve been focused on for a long time? One that seems to be just constantly out of reach (pssst ... most authors I know have a manuscript or two that probably has a timeline similar to this). I encourage you to sit back and write out the timeline for the goal with rough dates like I have.
I’ll wait while you do that in the worksheet.
A reminder to be kind to yourself
Now, let’s look at a different timeline … your life timeline in the same time period. This is a deeply personal exercise and one where you really need to be both objective and kind to yourself. What’s been happening for you in the last six to twelve months (or two to three years) that could have had even a small impact on your ability to reach your goals?
I did this exercise myself. That’s actually how this blog post came to be. I won’t share my timeline with you because that’s not the point of the article. But here are a couple of things that have definitely impacted me:
Moving house four times in the last 12 months, three times in the last 6 months (including next week)
Sudden losses, and transformations, of important relationships in my life
Fluctuating mental health due to all the upheaval
Contracting COVID
I encourage you to go into more detail in the worksheet or your journal so that you can really see just how much you’ve had on your plate that may have kept you from reaching this goal.
Remember to factor in the absolute chaos that has come after the world standing still for most of 2020. It’s almost like the global timeline feels like it needed to make up for lost momentum in the time since.
Speaking of current events — it’s likely it’s not just events in your own life that are effecting you. All of this energy surrounding us can have a profound effect on our productivity and mental health. So, the first thing I want you to realise, that has taken me too long to realise is that …
You are never solely responsible for not achieving your goals.
Even if you feel like you could have done better, or differently, or planned better. The truth is, you’ve likely been trying your best with what you had capacity for at the time. If you weren’t giving your goal your best, it’s likely your best was needed somewhere else at that time — keeping you alive, for example.
Some things that could have prevented you reaching your goals:
You didn’t have all the information that you needed at the time you set the goal to know if it was realistic or not — I definitely completely underestimated the scale of creating a course this comprehensive when I first started.
The rest of your life doesn’t stop just because you have a goal — things happen that are outside of our control.
The goal stopped resonating with you somewhere along the way — it’s okay to abandon goals that don’t resonate anymore. It doesn’t make you a failure.
We let other goals distract us when we get to the hard part, or when we want to feel like we’re busy without needing to work too hard.
Maybe you really could have tried harder, planned better, done better.
When you know you’ve come up short because you weren’t trying your best …
Honestly, we’ve all been there. I want to applaud you for being self-aware enough to know that is the case. So, what’s next? Will you re-evaluate, like I’m doing (in a round-a-bout way) by writing this article? Or will you find a new goal that you’re more motivated to give your all to?
Coming back to PTP for a moment.
Aside from the LIFE that insisted on continuing while I tried to work on this project, I’ve also been attempting to superimpose others’ ideas of what a successful launch, or course, looks like. I’ve kept feeling like a failure as my launch date approached and I wasn’t as ‘prepared’ as all the launch and business gurus would have me believe. But, I realised I’ve never really thought honestly about what a successful launch of this course, or even successful completion, looks like for me.
I’ve been too busy trying to make this journey look like what others said it should look like — holding myself to a too-high standard and too-tight timeline along the way.
So, what have you learned about the goal that I know you’ve been thinking about as you read this post? Download the companion worksheet to do a deep dive, reflect on your process, and find out what’s keeping you from reaching your goals this year.
Hey! I'm Danikka – editor, author mentor, and writer. I'm on a constant mission to break down the myth that there is any one ‘right’ way to be an author, to be creative, and to simply exist. If you're a creative like me looking for inspiring content that bridges the gap between the world of the editor and the world of the writer, between the brain of the audience and the marketer, come hang out with me on Instagram and sign up for my newsletter to get a quarterly, sometimes semi-monthly, download of writerly thoughts and editor’s advice. There’s no pretending here, what you read is what I believe. And I love to hear what you think as well.
