When Goals Failed: Adjust the Process

What happens when you feel like your goals failed? It’s mid-February, and I bet those goals you made at the beginning of the year seem like distant a memory. I get it. We all start out with such good intentions, but life happens. I want to encourage you to think back to those goals. The goals that you were so excited to take action on. Instead of accepting defeat or getting discouraged, let’s adjust the process of reaching the goal.

Adjust Your Time Line

I can speak with authority on having to adjust the time line of reaching my goals instead of accepting that my goals failed. Everything inevitably takes longer than I think it should. Don’t look at changing your time line as a negative. Look at it as having better insight into what it’s going to take to accomplish your goal, and a healthy understanding on what you are capable of accomplishing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Adjust Your Steps

Sometimes we need adjust the steps to meeting our initial goals by adjusting the steps to meet them. For example, you might have a goal to organize your home. Once you start this, you realize that you really need to focus on decluttering instead. In this circumstance you’re having to break your goal down into more specific steps. You realize that you can’t organize things the way you want to without decluttering first. In this example, we added steps to our process, but you might need to take some steps away. A couple of years ago, I wanted to improve my baking skills (anyone else get super inspired by The Great British Bake Off??). I thought that I couldn’t start practicing my baking until I had certain baking pans and other kitchen tools. It was freeing when I realized that I could cross off purchasing those things off my list and simply start with what I had. For some tips on goal setting, check out this post meant for busy moms just like you! If you are wanting to really dig in deep with your goal setting, I recommend the Powersheets Goal Planner.

Adjust Your Definition of Success

It’s easy to have a picture of what we think success looks like. The comparison trap can easily come into play here. Your success might not look like someone else’s. I think this is especially true if you have a fitness goal. We are often enticed to compare ourselves to others, when in reality our goals and our processes are so individualistic. I love the quotes from Lara Casey that say “little by little’ and “progress over perfection”. There is something so powerful when you take a step back and say, “I made progress! It might not look like what I thought it would, but I’m closer to my goal that I was.” That is worth celebrating!

It’s easy to make goals (you can read more about my 2021 goals here), but it can be hard to stick to them. It can be hard to persevere when you feel like your goals failed. But friend, I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you to adjust the process of your worthy goals for this year instead of accepting failure and tossing them out the window.