Writing Goals for 2023--Are You Keeping Them?

 

We're six plus weeks into 2023. At the beginning of the new year, I wrote a post about setting goals in your writing life. Some of people who read it decided to set some writing goals for the next twelve months. How many have kept working towards them, and how many have already discarded or ignored them? Some of each, I'm sure.

This morning, I read a daily devotion booklet that has very short devotions. Part of it hit home with the thought of setting and keeping goals. The author wrote the following:

"We have good intentions, but then we hit a barrier. Fear, doubt, greed, laziness, or lack of motivation, and we realize the old ways are the old ways because we have embraced them day after day."

Yes, we do have good intentions of working towards those goals we set. Then, some of those ingredients listed above prove to be road blocks. Fear, doubt, greed, laziness, and lack of motivation. Whew! That's quite a list. How easy it is to 'embrace' them day after day. 

Whenever we set goals in our writing life, we definitely have good intentions. Why, then, do we allow those barriers to keep us from achieving what we hoped to? We have to be made of stern stuff to surmount all those problems, but it can be done. Working to get rid of those blocks is not an easy task.

I know that setting too many goals at one time can be defeating. How in the world can we keep up with all those worthy intentions? One thing that might be a factor is that we don't make those goals with real determination. Our passion for writing doesn't shine through. Goal setting is serious business.

We also find those deterrents mentioned above, like fear, doubt, greed, laziness, and lack of motivation, to defeat us on our road to achieving our goals. I've suggested in other posts that you make a list of the goals you set and post it somewhere in the area where you usually write. Seeing them on a daily basis might act as motivation. Not every day, but many days. Out of sight, out of mind--that may be a cliche, but it works here. 

How about revisiting those goals you set? Or, if you never got around to making any goals in your writing life for this year, it's not too late. There's a great deal of 2023 left. 

Goal making and goal keeping are two different paths. Let's try to make those paths meet like a fork in the road.