The Creativity Project: Pushing Myself
Making my goals work for me.
I need to have goals to keep my forward trajectory. But I run into problems when they are too big or too small.
Too big and I’m frozen with the fear to fail.
Too little and I put it off because it’s too easy.
Finding the middle ground? Hard as hell until I was introduce to good/ better/ best goals.
The idea is simple: break your goal into the smallest bit that would be good, harder and bigger for better, and the hardest level for best.
This month, I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo. It’s easier than regular NaNoWriMo because you get to set your goals instead of it being an arbitrary goal of fifty thousand words. My goal was to hit thirty-five thousand words over the month of July.
I normally set my monthly goal to be thirty thousand, but the additional words shouldn’t pose a problem or burn me out the way NaNo normally does.
Big surprise, I completed my word count goal before the month was over. Then I completed my draft notes the next day. Now, I’m working toward my better goal of forty thousand words. Best goal of fifty thousand words.
I don’t have anything prewritten for this part of the draft. Just a few notes here and there sprinkled throughout the document and the knowledge of a missing chapter or two.
The good thing is that I don’t have to write a single word for the rest of the month and I will still have completed my goal. I’m over a third of the way through this draft of the novel and still have two months to go in the quarter. But I don’t want to lose the momentum.
And that’s what my better goal is nudging me toward: keeping up my momentum.
I’ve managed to get myself on this steady track this year on my writing goals. Pushing without burning out or freezing. The same cannot be said for my health goals. In the next few weeks, I need to figure out an external goal of a race or something to give me the nudge to get moving.
Once I get started, I can usually keep the momentum going.
What are your goals that you are reaching for? Let me know!
