Everyone is talking about writing goals–they’re good to have. It’s important to stay motivated and stay focussed. Big goals give us something to work towards, while daily goals keep us showing up and putting words on the page. But did you know, I once shut my writing down completely by setting the wrong goals.

In this episode, I talk about what kind of goals work and what doesn’t, and what to do if you are finding your creativity hampered by your need to succeed.

The Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the story coaching podcast. This is season three, Episode Three with me Charlotte MacFarlane from the writable.com.

And today I wanted to, I really wanted to dig into some mindset stuff. And we’re talking about goals. But, you know, I don’t want this to be your standard sort of smart goals, type of type of discussion, because I think we’ve all we’ve all kind of heard that. In the past,

what I really want to get into is the mindset stuff, the mindset of how do you achieve big things? How do you go for your big goals?

Yeah, so today, I really just kind of wanted to break down different types of goals as they relate to writing, why it is that goals work and the types of goals that have worked for me. But also what types of goals don’t work, or when goals don’t work, and what to do when you’re not hitting your goal. What to do when setting goals is stressful or it backfires on you.

Really, because, you know, goals have backfired on me when I’ve when I’ve put too much pressure on myself and actually shut down my creativity. But still being able to hold on to a goal about the direction that you’re going, how how do you how do you set a goal without setting a goal? How do you still work towards getting something done, when maybe you know the pressure, the stress is, is just not working for you.

Because we’re we’re all a little bit different, and how we how we process things and how we approach challenges. And we’re all a little bit different day to day, month to month, year to year in how it is that we approach goals. And I think understanding that is the first and maybe most important thing from from this talk today. We as individuals you as a person are going to have times when one type of goal works well for you other times when another type of goal works better times when goals don’t make sense, you’re gonna have a lot of changes and what works one month, it might not work the next month. And and that’s very normal. And it’s really important to recognize that and to recognize that we can be flexible.

And that’s that’s a lesson that I have paid my dues and learning this year. For those of you who’ve been following along and know the story You know, I’ve I’ve had health issues physical and mental this year I have been up and down you know, I’ve had some really great months, and I’ve had some months where it just was not in the cards to write. And I’ve also had a lot of months where I was my own worst enemy. And I really had to do the work to figure out how to work towards a goal. Without getting in my own way, how to continue to motivate myself towards something, something big, I mean, books, books are a big goal, they’re not something you can take care of in in 20 minutes. They are, they are a month long process if not longer. And understanding how to move through the mental hurdles of that is just as if not more important than understanding how to how to you know how to plan your characters, how to plot your story, how to world build, how to write, how to edit.

The mindset stuff is, is really underneath all of that. I always think you know, made up statistic there’s probably hundreds of 1000s of people in the world who who have a story that they want to share that have something in their head and they have a desire to write a book to, to write it to publish it to put it out there for other people to read. And many of them will not do it. And I’m so glad that you guys are all here listening today. Because Because I really think it’s important to understand that effort needs to be put in to get to goals, whatever your goal is. is an effort always needs to be put in, there’s a lot to learn, there’s a lot to master.

And at the end of the day, I mean that the mindset is what’s going to set you apart from someone who, who has maybe a fantastic story in their head, they Google a few how to things that tell them, you know, here’s your, here’s your chart for world building, here’s, here’s your questionnaire for building characters. Even, you know, even here’s how you set up your plot.

You know, if it was as simple as you know, here’s your five step process, which, you know, which I do talk about a five step process, but if it was that simple, if it was that straightforward, everyone would be doing it. And, and yes, I mean, there are there are straightforward steps that you take. But at the same time, understanding understanding the other piece, the the less tangible, non physical pieces that need to be in place in order to be able to take those steps, take those steps effectively, is is a huge thing.

And, and I hope that through through the end of this episode, today, you’re going to kind of have a have a deeper understanding of what I’m really trying to what I’m really trying to share with you guys. I think it’s something that you’ll probably we are talking about more, but something that really needs to be brought up. So much more in. I mean, really, in society today and in whatever, whatever industry, whatever interest, passion, whatever it is that you’re working towards,

we need to understand it’s not just the physical, there’s actually a mental level that comes first on an emotional level that comes first to to building those. Alright, so you know, and and this topic was really brought up by a fantastic question that came up in one of the pickup the pen challenges, where, you know, some what someone has asked me, they said, What do you set for a goal? What is it that you do in order to be able to, to write and put out words? And the truthful answer was, I use all kinds of goals, and they change all the time. And it really depends.

So goals that I have used in the past, you know, certainly, I like I like having a daily goal, I think it’s a good thing to have, but daily goals I’ve used, we’ve used word counts, you know, hit 5000 words today. I’ve used time goals, we’re going to write for four hours today. I’ve used section goals or like, like signpost goals, I’m going to write, I’m going to right through to the, to the inciting incident. Today, I’m going to get through the midpoint, I’m going to get to here, I’m going to get to there. Using those types of goals.

I also like to set much bigger goals. So I like to think about, what am I going to get to this week? What am I going to get to this month? What am I going to get to this year? You know, this year, I set a goal to write seven novels. And that sounds like a lofty goal. That’s that’s depending on who you are, maybe but it was, it was a bit of a stretch goal for me. So far, I’m at four. That’s right.

And and, of course, you know, being with some kindness to myself, because of the challenges that have come up this year. I don’t know if I’ll hit seven. But but four is not too shabby. So but

But the big thing when I was setting this big goal was understanding like, yes, it’s a stretch goal. Yes, it’s, it’s more than I’ve done before, but I do think it’s possible. And then understanding how to how to break them down how to make them into smaller goals that are much more manageable chunks.

Because I don’t know about you, but if I said to you, hey, you’re gonna write seven books this year. You or I challenge you to write seven books this year. You know, unless you unless you’ve had experience unless you’ve done it before it It sounds like a lot. And it probably feels a bit overwhelming and it feels like where do I start? How do I do that? So

So these types of big, lofty goals, I think are, you know, I think that they’re very important. Because maybe if I, if I told you, you are going to write seven, seven books this year, you probably get a little bit excited. It’s like, yeah, like that would be awesome. Absolutely. So So these big lofty goals are important to get us excited, they’re important to make us stretch to make us try to do more than we’ve done in the past, to try to grow and improve ourselves.

But then we also need to recognize the smaller, the smaller chunks of the goals that that need to get, that we need to pull out in order for for our brain to be a little bit more accepting of it.

And, and so I see, you’re kind of like two types of goals that I’ve used really effectively are two categories, maybe, and one being the daily goal. And the other one being the year, big stretch goal. I’ve also used goals like oh, I want to finish finish this trilogy by the end of August sort of thing. So there’s kind of like the daily, the daily goals, and then there’s the big stretch goals.

And both of those work really well together. Of course, because if if we’re thinking if we’re talking about seven books in a year, I mean, it sounds really exciting to be able to do that. But it also sounds really overwhelming if you’ve never done it before, and you have no idea how to do it. But if you start breaking it down, and you say okay, you know, seven, seven books is like 600 700,000 words, something like that. That’s like, less than 2000 words a day, if you write 365 days a year, right?

So so it’s not a crazy, it’s not, it’s not unrealistic to be able to do that, right? That’s, that’s the power of breaking down these big goals into these smaller goals is that it’s it all of a sudden, I hope you’re sitting at home going, Hey, you know, I could do that, like, I could write 2000 words a day. If If 2000 seems kind of daunting, I mean, recognize that it’s about two hours, it’s actually it’s probably less than that, but two hours is a good estimate or good. A good number to use when doing your math, because you’re probably going to overshoot.

So So if you’ve got two hours a day, and I mean, how many of us spend two hours in the evening watching TV, right? So So if you’ve got two hours a day, you can write seven books in a year. And, and I mean, that’s, that’s oversimplifying, because of course, we have time for planning. And we have time for editing and all of that, but but to get that word count, that’s all you need to do is show up two hours a day, every day. And you could do the math and figure out what that is, if you just wanted to do five days a week or whatever, right? But that, to me is, is the way to use those types of goals.

And having something like that every day, you get to form a habit. And of course, habits are exceptionally important. Because the first time you show up, it’s going to be it might be exciting, but like you know, the fourth or fifth time you show up, it’s going to feel hard, it’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be challenging to get your brain in gear, it’s going to be challenging to focus on the story, it’s going to be challenging to get the words out. And it’s also going to be challenging just to show up and because, you know, things are gonna come up, someone’s gonna say, hey, the new episode of your most favorite TV show ever is on tonight. Do you want to watch it? And you’re gonna say, yeah, maybe I will skip writing.

But if you have a goal, if you’ve got a daily goal, and you’re motivated towards it, it becomes so much easier to show up. And then once you do that, you know and and the science the science changes every so often, but if you show up 30 days in a row, or 21 days in a row, or six weeks in a row, something like that. If you do that, every day, it becomes a habit and it becomes an automatic decision that your brain makes.

So an automatic decision looks like hey look, it’s 8pm would I you know, am I going to turn on the TV or am I going to go right and and without a habit you have to think about that choice but with a habit you say I’m going to go right simple, straightforward. And, and that is the real power of having a daily goal having a daily practice that you stick to. But of course, that big, the big goal, the stretch goal, the year goal to put out seven books, which, you know, if if you’re on top of your marketing and stuff, that’s probably enough to build an author career.

If you’re like, I’m gonna get seven books out this year. And the thing that I have to do is show up two hours a day, if if you want the big goal, you’re motivated to show up for the small goal each and every single day. And, and that is, in my opinion, the best way to use to use those two types of goals together in an understand how, how a big goal gets broken down into little goals and have a little goal makes it possible to show are possible to achieve the big goal. While the big goal is giving you the the excitement and the energy to keep showing up day after day after day.

And so again, that’s that’s really how, how I use goals. And the type. That’s basically the two types of goals that I think you need to have. And you can decide for you if you want that to be a daily word count a daily time. Or if you want to be breaking it down like sections or scenes. I actually right now I’m am on a kick of I like to do scenes, I set a certain amount of time. But I’m going to do probably two scenes in that amount of time. And if I finish my two scenes, and I’ve got half an hour left, I actually just kind of call it early instead of continuing on. That’s what’s working. That’s that is what has been working for me right now.

Because of course there are times when goals don’t work. And this is really, this is what I really wanted to get into today. Goals sometimes don’t work, especially these these daily goals. Now big, you know, the big lofty goals, I think it’s important not to it’s sort of a softness about it, you want to you want to be aiming towards a goal that you want to get to like something that is exciting to you. But you don’t want to be so focused on the result, there’s a softness there, there’s almost like a trust or a knowing that that goal is available for you that you are able to achieve that goal. So So the big goals are about a softness and it really comes down to the daily goal where you may be need to be a little bit more, a little bit more disciplined with yourself in in showing up for those. And I think that there’s a few times or a few a few ways that goals go wrong. Or are really just reasons why maybe you’re not aiming towards the daily goal. And, and the first one is, if you don’t care about the big goal, if you don’t care about that, you know that big stretch goal, you’re unlikely to care about the small goals. Right, so so if you had a goal to if you had a goal to run a marathon and and he knew that you needed to show up for a little bit of running every day in order to to do that. But it turns out, you actually didn’t care about running a marathon. And it was like, you know, it was it was your best friend that wants to run the marathon and they just want you to do it with them. That’s going to be so much harder to show up every day. And there’s a way around that there’s a way to say, Okay, I’ve got the wrong stretch goal. And what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to focus on a different stretch goal. So with that example, maybe you don’t care about the marathon, but you care about your friend you care about showing up for your friend. And so that is the big picture that you focus on when it’s time to show up each and every single day. Same thing with writing a book you know, if you if you want to write, you want to write your your debut fantasy novel and and you are sitting down to write it you know that you need to show up every single day in order to do this. But maybe, maybe you don’t care about the story. Maybe the story doesn’t excite you. Maybe you tried to plan something that was writing to market and you You’re like just not into it. That’s that that happens. And if you’re not into the story, it’s unlikely that you’re going to show up in order to write it. On the other hand, kind of directly opposite of that, I believe that if you care too much about the goal, if or if you are not approaching it with that softness for the big goal, you can basically shut yourself down with pressure. And and this is something that that happened to me two years ago. This is something that happened to me where I had I had been having all the success, I had launched the trilogy, I had won some awards for some short stories, and just really saw like, yeah, like the the careers is coming, it’s really gonna take off. And knowing that I needed to get another book out. And I started to set these goals of like, I’m going to write a book every other month. And what ended up happening was, rather than, you know, doing the math, breaking it down, saying, yep, I need to write whatever it is, I need to write 3500 words a day, to finish a book in a month that I have a month to edit it, whatever. Instead of just like focusing on that, and saying, This is what I need to get done today, it became very much about the big picture became very much about I need to produce a book every two months in order to be successful. So I started looking at the huge goal, a goal that is difficult to wrap your mind around, being able to achieve. And I also started making it mean something much more than it really did. So. So that to me is a place where goals really start to fall apart, is when we start making them one mean more than they do. And to when we focus on the bigger goal, and we don’t believe that we can get there. So that’s why these small goals are so important. And that’s why just kind of like showing up every day, understanding that it’s a it’s a trajectory, it’s an average, becomes so powerful and so important. And of course, the other time when goals don’t work, is when you don’t even try to achieve them. Right? So. So if you say yeah, I’m going to show up for two hours every day. And you just kind of keep putting it off putting it off saying I’ll do it later, putting it off saying I’ll do it later. Basically, when you don’t show up for your goals, your goals don’t work for you. So the biggest thing really, that I wanted to talk about was when setting goals gets too stressful, or when it backfires when it shuts you down. Because of course creativity is like creativity and flow state is like this, like soft rubber tube. And if you hold it, it works perfectly. But as soon as you start to like grip it, it, it collapses, and the flow doesn’t come, the words don’t come you can shut down your creativity as soon as you put pressure on it, or if you put too much pressure on it. So this is and this is the big thing that I’ve really had to learn in my career. And it’s it’s one of those things where I kind of have to keep learning it over and over at at a new level all of the time. And, and it is also the thing that I see struggling authors kind of stuck on. I see struggling authors stuck thinking about, I want to write the I want to write the best book ever written, I want to write a best selling book, I want to write a book that people love, like focus on smaller tasks, focus on what you can control. You know, instead of wanting to write the best book ever written the next game of thrones, you know the next Lord of the Rings, focus on writing a book, write your book, there’s this thing called called the circle of control or the locus of control and it basically means you can only control your actions you can’t control how other people react to it. It is actually impossible for you to control whether you have this is maybe a bit of a bad example I was gonna say it’s it’s impossible for you to control whether you have a best selling book or not. Not meaning Can you hit a not not meaning Can you hit bestseller list, because there are techniques to that. But can you create a book that people love that people share that people, you know, that becomes kind of like a worldwide phenomenon, you can’t control that you can’t control how people are going to react to your book, the only thing you can do is create the best book that you have in you to go out into the world for people to to read, and hopefully enjoy. And hopefully see, see how see the greatness in it that you have put there, through the act of writing the best book that you can, you just you can’t control what they do after that. So understanding that and, and understanding that, you know, on the one hand, the goal needs to be you know, the goal isn’t write a best selling book, The goal is to write a book. And also understanding that, even a book seems is is a huge project, especially if you haven’t done it before, and understanding how to break it down into smaller pieces, the first thing that you need to do is you need to come up with a story before you can write the book once and in order to come up with the story you need to come up with, come up with the world come up with the characters come up with the conflicts, come up with the theme with the story problem come up with different scenes, you need to come up with all of these small pieces. And, and when we can start looking at the small pieces, looking at the pieces that we can control, all of a sudden, it seems so much more achievable, it’s so much more manageable to work on these things than it is to write the best selling book. So at the end of the day, really what this episode is about, really what I wanted to share with you is understanding that, you know and and there’s there’s all kinds of people that listen to this podcast. And and some, you know, maybe you are the listener that has written 20 books and just likes to absorb more, you know, more writing knowledge. But maybe you’re the listener who hasn’t written a book before and and you just know that there’s a story in your head, there’s a story in your heart and you are ready to, you’re really starting to explore options for how to write this story down. Or maybe you’re the listener who has tried to write a story and is, is kind of shutting themselves down with goals. Maybe you you’ve just not found found, found your right way through yet. The biggest thing that I wanted to pass on no matter where you are, is I do believe that goals are important. I do believe that we need to push ourselves and stretch ourselves and ask for more of ourselves. The focus here isn’t on making ourselves do something more. The focus here is on growing. It’s becoming more than we were the day before. More than we were last year more than we were 10 years ago. It’s always on what is it that that we want? What is the human being that we want to grow into and challenging ourselves to work towards being that next level individual. And for each of us, we get to define what that next level is. But once we’ve defined what the goal is, once we’ve defined the big picture, the stretch goal that we want. Being able to approach it with that softness. Being able to look at it and say yes, I want that. Yes, I believe that I have it in me. And and if you aren’t sure if you have it in you. You You have the vision, you have the desire you have the picture, which means you already have it in you. Maybe not on a physical button right Remember, this is about the mental and emotional states. And if you can visualize what it is to, to write that novel, to have that author career to become that international bestseller, you already have all of the pieces that you need, you have the energy pieces, you have the, the mental pieces, it just hasn’t come into physical reality yet, right? So So understand that if you have a goal, if you have a vision of where you’re going, you have the capability to get there. That is not something to come into doubt. And that that requires this, that belief requires a little bit of faith and practice to really absorb but take my word for it. Take my word for this. For this one thing, if nothing else, if you have a vision, if you have a desire, you can you can achieve it absolutely 100%. So let go now of the fear that is surrounding whether or not you can or can’t achieve this big goal that you have for yourself, because it’s not helping you. It’s not helping you get anywhere. And really what it is, is it’s your subconscious trying to keep you safe. So let go of that. So we need to challenge yourself to be better, we need to believe that we have it in us to be better because we do. And after that, we we get that softness, we get that knowing as opposed to a wanting now it’s a knowing. And all we need to do is we need to break it down into small, manageable bite sized pieces. And for me, I normally do think about word counts, I think about if I want to write seven books this year, how many words is that? You know, seven times? I don’t know, what do we want to say seven times, let’s call it 100,000 700,000 words, divided by 365 days, or you could divide it by 52 weeks or however many. However many days or weeks you want to show up writing. And you just divide it to figure out what it is that you need to be able to do each day. And now maybe the word count seems overwhelming. Maybe you know, maybe you did get a result back that said something like you’re gonna have to write 5000 words every day. From here A good rule of thumb is 1000 words an hour, most people write faster than that. But your first hour is usually going to be a bit slower. So it’s kind of nice, it’s nice to overestimate what you need. So So now you can say, Oh, you know, if it’s 5000 words, I need five hours of writing time every day. And depending on where you’re at in life, depending on on who you are and your other obligations, maybe that is too much. That’s okay. You can you can shift your big goal to be something to be something a little bit more manageable, or you can break it down and you can look at other ways to get there. Maybe it doesn’t have to be five hours straight, maybe it’s two hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. And in 5000 words, in a day is is a pretty aggressive pace, by the way. Like I don’t remember the math that I had done, but seven books in a year really was like 2000 words a day. Right? So so you’re probably going to find that it’s not an insane thing. And so if the word count goal seems overwhelming, look at the hourly goal. And I like looking at the hourly goal anyhow, because I just scheduled into my calendar say I’m gonna write from from this time until this time, that’s what I’m doing no questions. No, no interruptions, nothing gets scheduled here. Instead, it’s a non negotiable for me. And then you kind of he kind of let go of, of the big goal, because you know you’re going to achieve it. You don’t have to think about it anymore. You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to worry about it. It’s coming. All you need to do is you need to do the step every single day. You need to show up. And of course, we talked about this too. If you can’t show up one day, you know, my life is crazy. I’ve got two two little kids running around, demanding my attention. So if you can’t every day, that’s okay. Just recognize the trajectory. That you are on. Recognize that if you showed up three days out of five days, that’s still three days that you showed up, which is amazing. And, and so. So the secret really is to be continuously looking at the positive, you’re looking at the successes that you’ve had. And it’s not wrong to say, Gosh, I didn’t miss my goal, or I didn’t I didn’t hit my goal today. I missed my goal today and to be disappointed. But what we need to do then is look at it and say, Okay, well, what’s the reason why we didn’t hit the goal, to be not hit the goal, because we don’t care about the big goal, did we not hit the goal because we maybe made some some choices that did not allow us to, to hit the goal that we choose a different priority, did we decide to go you know, watch that episode of TV instead, that’s all right, you can make that choice. Tomorrow is another day to make to make a choice, again, whether there’s the same choice or a different choice, whether you’re going to choose, you know, TV or or, or writing, you get to make that choice all over again the next day. Or do we not hit the goal, because the goal is the goal is lofty, and our plan for hitting the goal was not the right one. For a while, I thought what I would do was voice dictate, well, I was rocking the baby. which worked really great, until I realized the sound of my voice was keeping the baby up and the baby was crying. And most of the voice dictation was just variations of where I sound. So recognizing that, you know, we make different plans, we try different things and we it takes some time to figure out what’s actually going to work. And, and again always having this softness and this knowing that we are going to get where we want to go and to not demand perfection of ourselves to not demand that we show up on a certain schedule and have certain amount of success. And and are always achieving this, this and this it is not you know that the key to success is not to burn yourself out with have tattoos. But to encourage yourself with want tattoos, right? I don’t write 5000 words a day because I have to, I write 5000 words a day because I want to. And that is what I want for you as well. I want you to have all the success I want you to be successful on your own terms. Because Because my goals are not the same as your goals. But you’re going to have your own goals that are uniquely important to you and and they are equally challenging. And equally sort I’m looking for respectable, equally wonderful goals. You’re going to have your own goals. What’s important to recognize is that yes, it takes it takes effort to reach them. And the way that we consistently show up the way that we consistently work with goals is by wanting them by recognizing that they are they are a desire that we are working towards and not a have to not a chore not something we need to do in order to avoid failure. And that’s some serious mindset work. That’s some deep mindset work. Hopefully some of it has is kind of resonated for you maybe all of it has resonated for you that would be amazing just open up some open up some blocks. But I think you know, I shared this is this is the ongoing process of my life to to want to want a bigger goal to push myself to get there and to have to kind of reset and remind myself what is it that I want? What is it that I’m working towards? Not what is it that I’m moving away from? That’s really that’s really all I wanted to say today was maybe to help you think about your writing goals and a little A bit of a different way. Alright, well thank you so much for listening. Again, I do hope I do hope it was an interesting topic today. I love chatting about this stuff and and this is a lot of work that I do with one on one clients or or even in some of the group mentorships if that’s something that you think you might want to explore a little bit more of you want to, to be working through some of your goals or maybe some of your sort of mental hang ups or mental blocks some of the reasons why maybe you’re not hitting the goals that you want to be hitting. Do you feel free to shoot me a message and I would love to to chat about that type of stuff with you. Alright, until next week. Thank you so much and happy writing.