This video about setting goals and celebrating your achievements was originally recorded for day 5 of my writing bootcamp. Here are some other videos you might be interested in:
- Let’s Talk About Your Why (Day 1)
- Narrowing Your Focus: Why This Book? (Day 2)
Transcript:
Good morning, everyone. It’s Bootcamp Day Five, and it is another parking lot. And the sun where the direction I’m parked in is not particularly great. So sorry about that. Where I wanted to go, there’s a garbage truck blocking my way. We made it to Friday. Yay. I’m so excited.
The topic of today is celebrations and goals.
I want to thank everyone that has participated this week. We’ve covered a lot of things: Your life, your writing life for your particular project that you’re working on. We talked about busting through writer’s block yesterday. And we talked about finding your optimal writing time on Wednesday. So thank you all for participating. Did you try some of the techniques yesterday? I had a couple people message me privately that said that they had, and they were very thrilled with their results. They tried something new and it really worked well for them.
So, yay! Julie made it live. Awesome. So anyways, exciting to see people trying things out. I hope that you learned some, new fun techniques that can really help you with your writing. And more than that, I just hope you’re excited about your writing again. In every project there’s kind of that messy middle or the slog, or sometimes where you just sort of lose a little bit of that enthusiasm. So I hope we gave you a little bit of a shot in the arm with that.
So Friday, we want to talk about goals and celebrations, and I have got to tell you, this is not my strong suit. I am wonderful at setting goals. I am not so great at celebrating them. One of the things that is really important as I’m learning about goal setting and about brain science is that your brain likes to be rewarded for doing the right thing. I mean, this is not a shock, right? Of course we know this intrinsically that we like to be rewarded for doing the right thing. And so when we accomplish a goal, we need to set a reward for that too.
So whatever that may be. Maybe it’s hitting your word count for the day. Maybe it’s hitting it for the week. It could even be a bigger thing. You know, like a whole book, right? But anytime you hit one of your goals, you should tie a reward to it. And it can be a small thing.
Maybe if you meet your daily word count, you go read a chapter in that book you’re really enjoying. Who knows what it might be. I really hate to tie it to food, but you know, a little square of your favorite dark chocolate. I mean, it’s telling your brain, you did something good,
right?
Actually, in my planner, I have a list of rewards because it’s really hard for me to think about how to reward myself. I usually have some of my favorite movie time at the end of the week. Friday night is usually my reward, but my rewards for bigger things, like finishing a book, you know, I have to make a list.
Hey man, I want to go to the beach for the day. That’s a really great reward. I don’t do it enough. I love to go to the beach. Why don’t I do that more? So, you know, there’s things like that. They don’t have to be expensive, and they don’t have to be even super big time-consuming, but something that tells your brain, hey, we put out this effort here and we got a good thing back from it and tying those two things together can be really important.
So let’s talk about the thing that comes before the reward, which is the goal. Goals are really important to set and they can be small goals and big goals. I love using Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner because it works with the way my brain works, but you know, whatever method works for you.
But one of the things he talks about, and that the planner does really well for me is you set, seven to 12 annual goals, and then you break them into quarterly goals. So those ended up being about a goal a month or, you know, some goals are longer. Like if you’re writing a book that goes into certainly more than one month, and some of your smaller goals you might do, in a couple of weeks.
But you break those into quarterly goals. And then every a week you look at it and you say, okay, what things do I need to do to make progress on these goals? Big three, your top three things. What three things do I need to do this week to make progress on those goals? And then every day, ask yourself the question: what three things do I need to do to make progress on those goals?
It’s really hard to do more than three things that are progress towards goals. Yes, we can run errands and make dinner and do those things that are on our to-do list that do need to get done. But putting those big three, focusing on your goals, how do you make progress towards your goals? That’s the question. I always ask myself what three things will make progress towards my goals today. Sometimes if you’re in a writing season, it might be having to do research. If you’re in a marketing season, it might be reading a book on that. Who knows what it might be, but you’re going to find the thing that helps you move your needle forward.
And it does help you prioritize, right? Because it’s so easy to get caught up with all of the things we have to get done. There are a ton of things to do, right? I mean, we’re not short of things that we need to do on our list. But we can get so busy doing lots of things that don’t necessarily move the needle on our goals, that our goals could get lost in all of that.
So on the goals you are working towards, try to make some step towards that as a priority. You might need to break them down into really tiny steps. And that’s totally fine. There’s no rush on this. There’s no competition on this. It’s all about what you need to do and where you are with your life.
But however you can break that down, so you’re making progress on those goals. That is something that is going to be so rewarding because at the end of the week, and even at the end of the day, you can say, “Oh, good, It may not have been a lot, but I did make progress towards that goal.” Because really nothing’s more frustrating than having something on your to-do list for the longest time and not being able to make progress on it.
I have one of those things that’s on my list. I have not made progress on it. And it’s frustrating. So if you can make steps forward towards your goals. And then once you’ve done that, and then you celebrate, your brain is going to want to recreate that process all the time. So it will create the goal and it’ll have the reward and the goal and the reward.
And once you get that going, just like when we talked about with habits, your brain is going to be desiring that, and it’s going to make it easier for you to find time for your goals. It’s going to want you to do that. It’s going to break through some of that resistance. So think about ways you can set some of your goals.
I would love to hear some of your goals below. They can be little ones. They can be big ones, whatever you’d like to share with us. I’d love to see some of those. I will put my goals down there in the comment box. Thank you guys so much for being with me this week. If you have enjoyed this and you’re not already part of my membership group, I would love to have you. You can check us out at TandemServicesInk.com. And if you get on the update list, you will get a free book. You’ll see, if you go to the website, you’ll see there’s a box sign-up box on the right, a free book Posts from the Pencildancers: Short Bites to Improve Your Writing Today. If you sign up to get that, you will go ahead and get on my list and be able to get my updates.
I’m going to do a much better job of sending career and craft, and commerce news. My goal is to get that out every month with writing tips. And of course, there’s also a link that you’ll see, it says “membership” and that will give you the information about the membership group, where we have community, in there, teaching every week, we have accountability threads.
We have our goal-setting threads in there. So, if you want a little bit more of this on a regular basis, you can come join us in that group. We would love to have you, I will put the link also in the comments. So I hope you all have had a great week. I hope you enjoy this weekend with a great way to celebrate the things that you’ve accomplished.
And I just love having you guys. We will be doing another boot camp in June and, who knows what fun things we’ll come up with. I’m constantly trying to think of ways that we can engage and talk about writing in some fun ways. I’m hoping to post some video snippets from my teaching last weekend.
If I figure out how to get that video off my phone and onto a website, I will share that with you. So anyways, have a wonderful Friday.
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