With the new year on the horizon I’ve been reflecting and thinking about goals to be setting for myself. Especially after this past year of unexpected challenges, it’s been an interesting thought experiment! Many of my reflections have started with looking at goals in general and have ended up focused on the concepts of mini goals and grace.
I think the concepts of mini goals and grace are important ones, especially as we look forward to this next year.
It’s a new year with new beginnings and fresh starts… yet also with ongoing challenges that haven’t been resolved just yet.
Where do goals fit into the landscape of the year ahead?
Goals are important, both for getting writing done but also to focus our lives on what is important to us. Setting smart goals helps us center our attention on our priorities.
I’d propose that setting goals and being intentional in our lives is more important than ever. Goals help by giving us a framework to our days and a focus for our efforts.
Yet regardless of whether you have more time than usual or less, there are unique stressors in our lives right now.
This means we may need to approach our goals with a greater flexibility than before.
This brings us to mini goals and grace.
Mini Goals and Mega Grace
Mini Goals
The concept of mini goals is not a new one.
I’ve talked about goals before and how we can break larger tasks into smaller ones in order to create achievable steps towards big results.
We can have year long goals broken into monthly goals with daily steps to be taken. Etc etc.
Mini goals is taking it a step further.
It’s recognizing that there are times beyond our control when we have very little time, poor focus, or limited resources for whatever reason: and that’s okay.
Mini goals gives us another option rather than giving up on our projects until life returns to “normal” or trying to continue with our regular goals and then feeling endlessly frustrated and guilty when we can’t meet our wordcounts.
When we see that our situation isn’t enabling us to meet our goals we instead adjust our goals instead of giving up or feeling guilty.
(Now maybe giving up for a time is what is needed, and that’s okay too. Taking a break can be healthy. We just don’t need to see it as the only option.)
Mini goals is the process of giving ourselves permission to cut our goals in half as needed. It’s breaking a day’s task into 5 days and stretching it out over the week with the weekends off.
It’s tiny progress. It’s baby steps and bite-sized pieces.
But it is still steps toward our goals and even small steps add up!
Plus, creating something- even if it’s a mini goal of writing for 2 minutes or just doodling on a napkin at lunch- can feel good! Making things engages our brain and gives us a bit of a boost.
That may be what creativity looks like for us right now.
The key is giving ourselves the freedom and flexibility to evaluate our mental wellness and our surroundings and adjust our goals accordingly without guilt.
Grace
The key to healthy goals (or pretty much anything!) is to try hard but to also have grace for when we fail. Because we won’t always succeed and every day won’t be perfect.
Grace is letting go of the guilt and the shame. Grace is knowing that we may fail today but there are more days to come and we can keep going.
Having grace for ourselves means loving and extending forgiveness to ourselves regardless of whether we feel we deserve it.
You are important and valuable.
Your health and wellness are important, both physically and mentally.
Your worth is not measured by productivity: not writing wordcounts, the cleanliness of your house, nor any other arbitrary standards.
Some seasons of life are just fine and dandy. But when times are hard it can be easy to feel down on ourselves. It can be hard to keep going.
It’s okay if we don’t feel awesome every single day. It’s okay if we aren’t creating masterpieces right now or if we have tiny little mini goals all year because that’s all we can handle. There is no rule that says we need to be moving fast.
Let’s be gentle with ourselves.
Let’s treat ourselves with kindness and just do the best we can.
And if our best is just baby steps? Or maybe taking a week off to rest?
That’s just fine.
We can still Dream Big and set Big Goals this year- those dreams and goals are important and good.
Yet I hope we can also be allowing mini goals and an abundance of grace to keep us thriving and well.
