Tag Archives: goals

Reaching Your Goals, Part 2

Posted on December 21, 2010 by | 2 Comments

In my last post I shared how I reflect on the year and then look forward to what I want in the coming year. Now, here’s Part 2 of my Reaching Your Goals post. It’s a little bit more involved than Part 1, which is why I broke it up.

I call it my Life Plan (here’s a handy Word document template). I break up my life into areas that I want to focus on so for 2010, it was
1) Writing
2) Crafts
3) Health
4) Financial

Under each category, I break it down into goals I want to achieve and underneath each goal, steps I’m going to take to achieve it. I also put months next to those goals so I give myself a timeline to achieve them. I’ll give a few examples from my own 2010 Life Plan and break it down so you can see what I did.


Under Health, I wrote:
• Run a 10K and train

Under Crafts, I wrote:
• Launch my Etsy shop, Typecraft, on Etsy.com – May 2010
• Research how to open an Etsy shop – Feb. 2010
• Budget money for expenses – March 2010
• Design earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings – March & April 2010
• Get the word out – May 2010

Truth be told, sometimes those dates got bumped back. I didn’t open my Etsy shop until October 2010 but I had the other steps in place so I was able to launch it with pieces designed and ready to sell.

What I like about doing this exercise is that I’m sitting down and figuring out what I want to do. This isn’t a to-do list. This is my life and what I want. This is you telling yourself these are the areas of my life that I want to move forward in and this is how I’m going to do it. To some, this may seem a bit too organized (I’m the lady who loves walking through the Container Store) but I hope you find it useful.

I’ll tell you two things that came out of my Life Plan that totally surprised me. One of my financial goals in 2009 was to buy a house. I even wrote a month next to it. April 2009. Brendan and I closed on a house in LA in April 2009. We sold it a year later to move up to the San Francisco Bay Area but I reached one of my goals. To own a house. The second thing that surprised me: running a half-marathon. One of my first health goals was to run a 5K, then a 10K, then a half-marathon, which at the time seemed nearly impossible. For two years in a row, I ran a 5K. The thought of running a 10K scared me but I kept putting it on my Life Plan. Finally this year I ran a 10K in July. After I conquered that, I thought, well, I’ve been training hard, let’s keep going. And that’s how I finished a half-marathon. You’ll see that once you hit one goal, it inspires more, and pretty soon you’re doing exactly what you set out to do.

So here you go, my simple steps to combating your writing fears/worries/jealousy. I’d love to hear some of your Life Plan goals or what you realized about yourself after writing down what you’ve done in 2010.

Have a happy & wonderful new year!

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Reaching Your Goals, Part 1

Posted on December 14, 2010 by | 13 Comments

I had a wonderful response to my honest-yet-uncomfortable blog post about writing jealousy. I loved everyone’s comments and the fact that for writers and other creatives, jealousy can be an uncomfortable truth. Here’s how I combat that problem.

In that post, I mentioned that I would share what I do to attain my writing/life goals. It’s something I started about 3 years ago at the end of the year, and since the new year is just around the corner, I’ll do it again. I first learned these goal exercises from a women’s writing group, which helped me immensely. I’m breaking up this post into 2 parts.

For this exercise, I created a Word document you can use (click here). I normally just write these dates and months in my journal. Feel free to use whatever method works best for you. To start, write down all the months from 2010 and then 2011. January 2010, February 2010, March 2010, etc. Then repeat with 2011. In the 2010 column, write down in each month significant events that happened to you, whether it be writing related or personal. Like for me, I moved to the Bay Area in April 2010 and our house in LA sold in July 2010 so I would write these events down next to the appropriate month. Write down everything, good and bad. Then for the coming year, jot down things you’d like to achieve in those coming months. Yes, I know you have no idea what you’re even doing this weekend, let alone August 2011, but trust me, just write down notes to yourself. Even if some months are blank. Like for me, I want to finish an outline of a new YA book by February 2011, so that’s what I’d write down.

Now that you’ve written everything down, take a look at yourself and give yourself a pat on the back. Look at how much you’ve accomplished in 2010 and overcame and look what you have to look forward to in 2011. When a new year rolls around, we tend to think about 1) losing weight 2) doing better 3) what we don’t have. With this exercise, you’re reflecting back on what you have done and what you will achieve. It’s much more helpful to say, “This year, I finished a draft of my book, celebrated a wedding anniversary, and traveled to Europe,” than to say, “I want to lose 25 pounds next year.”

I think what’s been the most helpful to me is to celebrate my accomplishments. My very own, not somebody else’s. I’m very much the person who is planning 10 steps ahead rather than looking back and saying, hey I did that, cool. This exercise helps me refocus my goals and see what I have achieved and what I want to achieve. I hope this helps you too.

Special thanks to SJ Hodges and the Wednesday Writers Group for introducing me to this easy yet wonderful writing exercise.

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