Reaching Goals (Or In My Case, NOT)

It's my two-month WAnniversary. One month ago I wrote a post celebrating my first month here at WA and sharing how energized and motivated I felt. And I publicly set some goals. The first one was

• 1 month from now - to have completed module 3 of the training and to have monetized my microgreens website

I also privately, within the Site Editor platform, set a writing goal to publish 10 articles within that same time.

I'm here to report that I accomplished exactly half of each of them, : /

Now, I am straight up the "glass half empty" kind of gal. I know I "should" be celebrating the progress that I *did* make, congratulating myself for even partial success, focusing on baby steps, yada, yada, yada...

But if I typed all that up in a blog post, I would not be holding true to my authentic self. I have set goals in the past and achieved them - and it is an absolutely awesome feeling.

This time I set goals and did not achieve them. Doesn't feel nearly so great.

I don't have time to go more than one round with myself over this, though. I'm going to go through a brief process that I remember with the acronym AERO:

• Acknowledge the situation: I only achieved half of my WA goals for the month.
• Evaluate the cause: Perhaps my goals were not realistic. Perhaps I should have just set one goal to focus on, rather than trying to accomplish two different ones. Perhaps I shouldn't have spent the weekend binge watching "The Good Place" and eating Junior Mints (hypothetically speaking, of course.)
• Revise the plan: OK, new goal for the next month - complete module 3 of the OEC. No separate writing goal, just write however many articles get assigned as part of the training itself. Focus just on that goal. Commit to a schedule to work towards the goal. (I need to put some though into what is actually doable here considering the other demands on my time.)
• Onward! Just do it. <Insert your favorite motivational cliché here.> However I want to phrase it, after I've acknowledged my situation, evaluated the cause and revised my plan, then I do the work.

I know that this system works.

I know that success is ahead of me if I just don't quit and keep working at it step by step. And this time next month I expect to be writing a brag post (while remaining humble) about how I did just that and met my goal. I appreciate y'all that are going along on this same journey with me. Here's to all our success!