Failure Guaranteed!
Moving through shame to set resonant, rational goals.
Dearest patient readers, let’s have a chat about goals. Setting them, occasionally forgetting them, and—inevitably—coming up short.
Because I’m sorry to say that unless you keep your aspirations VERY tiny or you are blessed with absurdly good fortune from cradle to grave, you WILL come up short. Failure is all but guaranteed to those who dare to do anything interesting.
For example, one of my goals is to post here biweekly. But now it’s been almost two months. Time flies! There’s been a Thursday or two where I just fully forgot….that it’s Thursday, that it’s posting week, that I have a Substack at all, that I’m a person with thoughts worth sharing.
When I remember both my goal and my recent failure to achieve it—usually because some kind soul has told me they enjoy reading these—I feel like this: 🫣. Or this: 😳. Or even this: 🥸. But mostly I’m able to soothe that brief jolt of guilt and shame with a reminder that I can start again whenever I choose, nothing is actually lost, and I’ve had a lot going on, SHERYL!1
That said…this one is a pretty modest goal with relatively few negative consequences if I miss the mark.
But what happens when we swing BIG and miss?
Or when we wake up and realize we boldly entered the big race an embarrassingly long time ago and we’ve barely even left the starting line?
Or when we suddenly realize we’re using multiple sports metaphors to speak to a group of artists and creatives???2
Oh well, we love questions in groups of three, right?3
Recently one of my clients came to our session feeling like a failure. Her tasks from our previous meeting had gone largely undone and when she stepped back to look at the past five years of her life, she felt deep shame and regret about her unfulfilled creative goals.
But here’s the thing about goals…they are not meant to be a stick with which to BEAT yourself!
At least, that’s not what I mean when I force encourage my clients to set them. Most of us do not actually respond positively to “tough love” or shame. Some people think they do, but I have come to believe that is mostly the result of clinging to cultural ideals about what makes someone “strong” or “hard-working” or “successful,” rather than an honest assessment of what we each need individually in order to thrive.
I can’t tell you how many clients have told me they need a drill sergeant as a coach when they actually need a soft place to land and a gentle guiding hand.4 The world is hard enough, especially when you are constantly making yourself vulnerable in service to your creative endeavors. You will get your ass kicked out there. Don’t do it to yourself first.5
Since a goal is not a weapon (we all agree, right? …RIGHT???), I convinced my client to put down her cudgel and together we explored those feelings and compared them to what has actually happened in her life over the past five years.
It turns out…she did actually accomplish some big, scary things! And she also encountered some huge challenges that were not her fault. Sometimes life just drops you into a swamp of shit. We trudged through the muck until she made a big discovery…she hadn’t actually felt safe in five years. FIVE YEARS! Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, y’all.6 We cannot maintain our capacity for creativity and inspiration if we don’t have our basic needs met, safety included!
Fortunately, she already felt that she was turning a corner and she made a commitment to prioritize safety in her daily life. Together, we made a list of what behaviors make her feel safe, both practically (e.g. financial security) and psychologically (e.g. community and mindfulness).
NOW she’s ready to set some new goals.
“Okay Erin, but why are we talking about failing to achieve my goals when you haven’t even taught me how to set a decent goal yet?”
Because if you’ve read this far, you likely already have some ingrained habits and/or past hurts around unfulfilled goals. I wish I could say I was only talking to mid-career artists here, but I’ve coached 22-year-olds already suffocating under the weight of missed milestones and regrets and that constant “running out of time” pressure. You’re never too early to feel behind!
Step 1: FORGIVE YOUR PAST SELF
Now that you’ve addressed your past (or started to), we’re going to skip ahead to the future! In both my private coaching and my work with Actor Salon, I’ve always used a slightly more complex goal-setting framework, a riff on the classic SMART goal system with a few tweaks for creatives.
But lately I’ve been thinking about how to distill that framework down into its most essential and resonant parts. What I’m swimming around with right now is this:
A GOAL is where a DREAM meets a PLAN.
Groundbreaking? Perhaps not. But there’s power in simplicity.
So…on to your future!
Step 2: PICK A DREAM
If you were being your most audacious, most ambitious self…what might you imagine? Forget the rules and the timelines. If it feels impossible to accomplish anything meaningful in the next 6 months, look a year out. Or two years, five years, ten years, I don’t care! Go as far as you need to in order to free yourself from the restrictions of the present and tap into the power of your dreams.
Once you’ve zoomed out and are starting to have the tickle of an idea, there are a few questions you can ask yourself. Does this dream align with my values? Do I feel excited when I imagine telling an important person in my life that I achieved this? Is it a little bit scary to say out loud?
If the answer to any of these is “no,” that might be a sign to keep looking. At this stage, we’re looking for a mix of excitement and resonance. Inevitably, you will have to do something hard. Part of your journey will be boring or annoying or involve doing something you aren’t good at. You will have to be vulnerable. I promise, you are going to need something up ahead that’s bright and shiny and thrilling to pull you through the dark times.
And if it isn’t at least a little scary, you might not be dreaming big enough! I don’t know all of you personally, but I’ve found that my creative clients have a tendency to dream too small rather than too big. And if you’re worried about being delusional, you’re probably not—because the delusional folks aren’t worried! You can always run it by a trusted friend7 or a coach like me. :-)
Now let’s settle into the present. What lies between you and your dream? If you had to zoom WAY out to find a dream that truly felt motivating, this might be a good moment to move backward along that timeline.
Step 3: MAKE A PLAN
Here’s an example I use with my actor clients to illustrate how to reign it in while still honoring your grandest aspirations: Let’s say your dream is to be the lead in a Marvel movie. Sounds huge, right? And certainly could be pretty delusional if you mean the NEXT Marvel movie and you aren’t already famous. BUT if we take away the judgement and let the time frame on the big goal be completely open, we can start moving backward and find some nice, reasonable objectives we can act on today. Maybe you want to develop your martial arts skills and film a fight reel. Maybe you have an idea for a superhero short film you can produce yourself. Maybe you want to target casting directors who work on those films and make them your biggest fans.
Then the key is to pick one and set a deadline for yourself. Generally, I like to work in 6-month increments because it’s long enough to dig in and accomplish something meaningful, and short enough to stay focused on the finish line. But sometimes three months is perfectly reasonable! And sometimes we might need a longer time frame for a big project—although I recommend setting milestones along the way if you’re looking at a year or more.
Once you have your reasonable—but still exciting!—version of the goal, you can start writing out the steps you need to get from here to there. Or just the first step! If it feels overwhelming, take it one week at a time. And don’t be afraid to ASK FOR HELP if you aren’t sure where to start! Be respectful of people’s time and energy, but also remember they are allowed to say no! As long as you’re not being pushy or coercive, it’s not your job to maintain other people’s boundaries for them.
And now…you execute! If you want to keep things streamlined—maybe your plate is full with other responsibilities or you’ve struggled with focus in the past—stick to a single goal. If you have a few different areas of interest and aren’t tapped out on time and energy, head on back to step two and repeat the process! Most of my clients work on 2-3 goals at a time, but make sure they don’t build on each other directly! If my goals are to finish my book and get an agent to sell that book, it’s best to tackle those one at a time. Finish the book, mark that off and CELEBRATE, and then look toward finding an agent.
And please, I am begging you, DO NOT use this new timeline as another weapon against yourself! If you say 6 months and it takes 8 months, WHO CARES?! If your goal is juicy enough, it will taste just as sweet in November as it would in October. But DO use that timeline as a tool. Stop and take stock. Are you doing everything you can and it’s just a matter of time? Is there something about your strategy that could use tweaking? How much of your success is in your control vs. out of your control? Be honest, but be kind to yourself.
You absolutely deserve to live out your dreams, one goal at a time.
I don’t know who Sheryl is but she sounds like she’s probably just trying to be supportive! 😂
I haven’t run a race since high school and I was terrible at cross country. Strangers on the sidelines who were matching my pace at a brisk walk once yelled, “You have such long legs! Use ‘em, girl!” I wish I could say that spurred me on to my best time ever, but alas it did not.
Shit, that was four. This piece is ruined.
And if you actually do need a drill sergeant, I am absolutely not the coach for you!
And certainly don’t pay a coach or teacher to do it for you! Unless you’re into that. But please explore your kink safely!
Someday I’ll do a whole post about this, but if you aren’t familiar, here’s a quick primer.
Make sure is isn’t someone who is jealous, competitive, or super negative. I have seen this backfire in ways that have everything to do with that friend’s issues and NOTHING to do with you.