Goal accomplishing needs focus and accountability

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about goal setting – or should I say goal accomplishing – as you probably can tell if you’ve been reading my recent posts.

Last year I realized how much I was capable of – with all I had done for my school’s PTO, I realized that I needed to apply that same level of energy, intensity and follow through to my own career, which I have been less and less passionate about as time goes on.

It’s been tough to figure out where to go with my career. While friends tell me, “Kathy, you always seem to know just what you want and go for it,” I struggled with the fact that in this case, I didn’t know what I wanted.

OK, fessing up here, I still don’t know.

But, in reading the Artist’s Way and through support from other women working through their own struggles to go down the path less followed, I’ve realized that it’s more important to move forward – in any direction – than to stall in planning mode.

So, I am moving forward. The path hasn’t been straight – but I’ve let myself explore different options: art, painting, writing, blogging, building an online community website, among others. I have so much flexibility in my current career, and I’ve realized that I do not want to give that up. Maybe when my kids are older, I’d be more willing to commute, be away from the house for 40 hours per week, or travel a lot more. But for now, it is important to me to reach my goal to expand my career while continuing to have more quality time with my family than the average full time worker.

Two recent pieces of advice are on my mind today as I continue down my new career path… FOCUS and TRACKING.

FOCUS: yes, I may not know where this path of possible creative work may lead me, but it is time to bring to focus the one avenue that I want to focus on now. I did this last week – I focused on the online community website idea I had. And I did not fail – I learned – and what I learned is that from my research, it’s not the avenue for me right now. Which brought me back to the creative art path. One that I was actually quite sad to give up for the other path, to be honest, but realized I couldn’t do both at the same time. So this morning I am back on my creative art path and I vow to FOCUS on it and only it, with the time I have set aside & will prioritize for my new career, for the month of Feb. and March.

But what about accountability? That’s where the next part comes in.

TRACKING: According to M.J. Ryan in her book “This Year I Will…” (which I highly recommend by the way), people who track their progress are much more likely to succeed at reaching their goals than those who don’t. This is partly because change often can happen with little shifts over time, and if we don’t have a way to track it, we don’t necessarily recognize that change has indeed happened. I can definitely see how in the last year, I have changed, but I often forget and focus on what hasn’t changed, instead of what has. Partly because I haven’t put in place a quantifiable way to track my progress.
Tracking goals helps us quantify the change, and allows us to give ourselves a pat on the back and recognize the results of our efforts.

So I will be tracking how many hours of time I put into my new plans. I will spend 10 hours per week on artwork to sell, for the month of February and March. Starting March 15, my goal is to be selling at least 6 items on my Etsy shop per week, and I’d like to continue at the pace and focus on that goal for 4 weeks.