What I have discovered about myself recently is that I set goals that are extremely hard to reach. At times, I have even changed goals that are challenging but still obtainable into larger goals that I just can’t quite meet. The problem with this is, even though I have achieved or even surpassed the original goal, I still feel like a failure for not meeting the bigger goal after being so stressed out and pushing myself to get there.

For instance, for this Camp NaNo, since it had been a while since I had written anything, I set a smaller goal than usual at 30,000 words, writing a thousand words a day. At first, this felt like a pretty challenging goal because of how little I have written so far this year, but when I started writing 3,000 words a day because the story was taking off, I moved the word count goal to 50,000. Now at the end of the month, I am a few thousand words behind because I lost the momentum of the story. For the past several days, I have been so stressed out and down on myself because I knew that I was not able to meet that goal this month.

In the meantime, I have surpassed my original goal by 15,000. I was about to end this month feeling like a failure, while in reality, I am a lot further in my word count than I thought I would be at the beginning of this month.

After reflecting on this revelation, I’ve come to realize just how often I shoot myself in the foot with such lofty goals, whether they start that way or not. There have been so many times in my life that I have felt like a failure or that I wasn’t good enough at something because I had not been realistic with my goals. But of course I didn’t meet those goals! They were asking too much of me, especially because I had more than one lofty goal I was trying to meet at a time.

From now on, I am going to work on being kinder and more understanding to myself when I set goals. I want to start feeling like I am achieving what I am actually achieving rather than letting the goal stress me out and make me forget how well I am doing. For instance, for the next Camp NaNo, I am going to set a goal of 40,000 because it is a goal I know I can meet but will still challenge me.

Setting goals is a good practice to get into, and I highly recommend people who struggle with getting things done to set some. But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and setting goals is not an exception to this rule.