I do!!!! Probably obsessively so!
I love a good goal. The key is to understand what a good goal is. Goal setting should be about setting tangible, realistic, achievable goals. Being unrealistic can lead to feeling like failure, which will adversely impact your mental health.
I prefer smaller goals. You have a dream, which is the overarching goal. You have to break that dream into parts, starting with your beginning goal. With the writing, the goal was to finish writing a book’s worth of words. I did that. Then the next goal became to publish it. Now, I am trying to finish another book. I had hoped to have finished writing two more by the end of the year and that is not realistically going to happen now. Maybe one.
So I know the goal is not going to be reached by the designated time. I go over the reasons why. I had a real sad year. The kid left, my dad died, and so on. Those are all reasonable events that impacted my ability to reach my goals. So now I am going to set a new goal post, with a smaller goals. Try and finish writing a book in six months. That is fairly reasonable. The book is in progress and I am acknowledging that some days are going to be harder than others, but I have given myself something to work toward.
The important thing is to keep moving forward. Goals should not be a detriment to your well being. If you fail to reach a goal, then change what your goal should be. If I wanted to run a marathon, but broke my leg. Running a marathon would be a dream. The goal would be getting back to running regularly again. Once I reach that goal, then I can set a goal for getting back into the proper condition for a marathon.
Remember to keep goals and dreams as separate things. Goals should be achievable, small steps toward your bigger dreams.
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