Goal Setting

For those of you just tuning in, you’ve been lucky enough to miss out on me flaking on deadline after deadline the last few months. Sunday night would sneak up on me, and I wouldn’t have the inspiration or time to cobble something together. I could have just written these off under “my blog, my time schedule.” Me being in control makes me my own boss, after all.

My brain had other ideas on the subject. Every blown deadline caused a chain reaction of self-recrimination and guilt. Not helpful, to say the least.

When I am honest with myself, these feelings weren’t exclusive to missing blog post deadlines. There are other things in my life I’ve been letting slide over the last few months. Ok, maybe longer. And I end up being bombarded by guilt over having to push the goalposts back repeatedly.

They had to go. But how?

That’s a good question. It’s one of those questions where the answer depends much on the person more than the problem trying to be solved. What do I need to accomplish this?

Well, being honest, I had lapsed into being terribly disorganized about posts. I was waiting for inspiration to strike, which we all know she’s fickle. That wasn’t always my strategy for Nerd Girls. When this first started, I was planning out my posts ahead of time. I knew when I sat down to write what I was going to be writing about. My approach wasn’t entirely the “fly by the seat of my pants” variety. I was using Evernote to write notes and adding the intended posting day to each idea. Not sufficient motivation to get things accomplished, I see that now.

On a lark, I bought a Legend Planner off of Amazon to make a first attempt at righting this and my other sinking ships. The sample pages looked like they were geared for what I was trying to accomplish. Usually, I wouldn’t buy into this kind of thing. There was, what I think of as, “frufie” platitudes implied for this planner. I needed to start somewhere, though. If it didn’t help, I was only out a little more than twenty bucks.

For all of the advertising stating “Monthly planner to hit your goals,” I thought there would have been more instruction than what was found on the small folded card. It was enough to get me started, so I really shouldn’t complain. I’ll save that for trying to fill out the pages preceding the monthly and weekly calendars. A smackling of preprinted, generic questions doesn’t sound that intimidating on paper (pun intended). When I bought the rose gold planner, I was looking to find a pathway away from beating myself over missed deadlines. I didn’t foresee discovering anything else about myself. But it turns out those questions had more to tell me than I had to say to them.

Inevitably, when Megamillions or Powerball jackpots get to the stupidly insane levels of winnings, the question of what would you do with the money comes up. A conversation ensues, filled with extravagant plans for the imaginary money. Everyone has a plan for how that money will be used. Ideas, if written down, would probably create a list pages and pages long. Who hasn’t spent time deep-diving into this scenario with your friends and family?

I have. Many a time. It wouldn’t take me very long to spend a nice chunk of the winnings to set myself up with a super comfortable lifestyle.

Take away the jackpots and simply state list fifty dreams. Heh. Well, that’s a horse of a different color. It’s not really, but apparently, it is. That step in the legend planner start-up steps took me two days, and I don’t have fifty dreams written down. I gave up around forty-three or forty-four. I didn’t have enough creative power to limp through to number fifty.

The text even states to basically shoot for the moon. Money is no object. Making the exercise tantamount to how would you spend a jackpot of 500 million dollars. And there I sat with writer’s block. Well, dreamers block.

Not a great start, I admit.

I can’t help but wonder if this lack of dreams isn’t so much a lack of material but a lack of confidence to write out what I want. Putting pen to paper to admit I want something, especially if it’s a big get, is intimidating. Or rather, it’s a sort of learned intimidation.

Five year old me would have rattled off a hundred dreams, most probably nonsensical. I ran everyone’s heard of an astronaut-baseball player-writer, right? But thirty-something me, not so much. Dreams, paradoxically, must be practical.

I didn’t complete the whole exercise, but I understand what the point of the exercise was. To let go of the learned behavior of not talking about your goals and dreams. So often, when comfortable enough to admit what we want, we are met with looks of incredulity and or that distinct look indicating what we have admitted to is nuts.

I was able to put down some dreams that could possibly be out of reach without too much hesitation. After all, I wasn’t going to get those looks from a piece of paper. If I did, I’d have bigger problems than getting a look, suggesting that I was crazy.

That wasn’t my only stumbling block. The biggest and probably most shocking, was my inability to assign rewards. The girl who very often buys herself a birthday present couldn’t come up with rewards to incentivize hitting the goals I have set.

Yes, I buy myself gifts from time to time. Weird perhaps. But when you have self-esteem struggles, sometimes you need to gift yourself things. A signal you appreciate you. If you haven’t dabbled in this practice, I’d recommend it. You’re in a relationship with yourself whether you acknowledge it or not. Wait, no. Forget the self-esteem struggles. Gift yourself things even if you’ve got self-esteem. You’ve earned it.

But in this instance, I struggled. Big time. What are these goals worth in reward?

This was a question I had a battle to nail down. I’m not sure I even did a good job. What is the price for your dedication to something? There should be a chart or something.

In this particular exercise, a chart of any kind is omitted because the reward needs to fit the person. But something anything would have been helpful.

COVID raging doesn’t necessarily help anything. I’d have many avenues for rewards. But I feel like I shouldn’t run the road ragged on the whole Coronavirus excuse. The instructions card wasn’t particularly helpful, either. That has more to do with me than the card, though. The example reward was a spa day. Even in a non-COVID world, the idea of a spa day would be more likely to motivate me to tank the goal than to accomplish it. I find no reward in strangers touching me.

Here too, I shouldn’t lay the blame at COVID’s door. There are plenty of other avenues for me to find goal rewards. Yet, I couldn’t easily access answers for this. Needless to say, It took me a bit longer than 48 hours to put down my reward for achieving my goals. Yikes. But I did it.

I can’t put my finger on why this of all things tripped me up. Suppose I had to take a stab at answering why. In that case, I’d turn my thought to the inability to see my accomplishments as worthy of such action. This is counter to the practices we learned as kids. How many books do you think would have been left unread if not for Book-It? A personal deep dish pizza was ample motivation to find and demolish five books.

But when I think about it, Book-It and other incentive programs were all someone else dangling a carrot in front of our faces. We weren’t the ones tying the carrot on a stick and dangling it for ourselves to chase. We receive feedback and rewards for our actions from other people sp often, we haven’t been put in the habit of rewarding ourselves. Or at least, I haven’t.

I’m sitting here whining about my stumbling blocks, but really, this has helped me in some small part. On a basic level, setting myself up to hit my deadlines got me an entire Monday post where I didn’t have to reach for a subject to write about. I have no idea whether or not the planner will help me long term stick to my goals, but starting the process has shown me I have some blind spots when it comes to myself and patting myself on the back.