What Honoring Your Stage of Life Has to Do with Achieving Your Goals

When it comes to your writing goals, are you honoring the stage of life you’re in?

Recently, I’ve been beating myself up for failing to go down to the (very cold) basement to walk/jog a mile or two first thing in the morning.

I thought if I “got serious” about it, I’d be more likely to do it.

Uh-huh.

After several months of failure, I read something that made me think again about this unsuccessful tactic: honor the season of your life.

What Does it Mean to Honor the Season of Your Life?

It was in a blog post about setting New Year’s goals that I ran across the idea. (Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of it or I’d refer you to it here!)

The point is to honestly take into consideration where you are in life before setting your goals or deciding what you want to do over the next six months to a year.

I’d never even considered such a thing. I’ve always set goals with only my dreams and desired achievements in mind. I wanted to write a book, so I set up a schedule to do that. I wanted to get fit, so I set up a daily workout schedule. And so on.

It used to be easy. But I’ve noticed that now that my professional activities have expanded, grown, and gotten more exciting, fulfilling, and time-consuming, finding the time and motivation to exercise is getting harder.

What Stage of Life Are You In?

No matter what stage of life you’re in, you may be finding something similar.

Maybe you’re a new mom and that’s added a complication to your plans to write a book. Perhaps you’ve developed a serious illness and it’s derailed your progress toward your dream project. Maybe you started a new job and the hours are wearing you out, leaving little energy for anything else.

I think most of us tend to default to blaming ourselves. I’ve spent months on my own guilt trip for not following through on my morning exercise plan.

But after I read that about “honoring the stage of life you’re in,” I took a step back and thought again. Maybe I was approaching it all wrong.

How Honoring Your Stage of Life Can Lead to Success

My schedule has changed over the past year, and it’s left me with less time to exercise in the afternoon when I’m used to working out.

I can still do my afternoon workouts two days a week, but that’s not enough to keep me feeling healthy.

The solution, I figured, was to change my workout time to first thing in the morning on those other days.

Great idea. Just not for me.

The problem is I’m a night owl. I do my best to get to bed at the same time most nights, but I don’t always succeed, often because I get into my fiction writing late at night.

Add to that the fact that my treadmill is in the basement. My basement is unfinished and very cold in the winter. There are a couple of space heaters down there, but of course, I don’t have them on overnight, so a “first thing in the morning” exercise means getting out of the warm bed, piling on layers of clothing, and braving the frigid temperatures below.

Then we get an Arctic blast like we’ve had a couple of times this winter—where the overnight lows have dipped down into the -30 realm (ugh!)—and getting out of bed is hard enough without forcing myself into a deep-freeze basement.

The result has been months of good intentions going absolutely nowhere. Along with lots of self-admonishments and feelings of failure.

Time for a shift in thinking.

Honoring Your Stage of Life: A Shift in Thinking

Considering this idea of honoring your season of life, I realized a few things. First, I’m not a morning person. I never have been, and the older I get, the more difficult it is to go against my own circadian rhythm.

Second, I’m no longer in my 20s, which means that it takes more motivation and will to keep up with my regular exercise routines. It also means that other things in my life (writing, music) are competing strongly with my desire to stay healthy.

If I take these things into serious consideration, I realize that I’m setting myself up for failure to imagine I’m going to somehow manage to leap out of bed in the morning to go into a very uncomfortable setting to exercise.

Kind of like expecting my very active German shepherd to sit still when I pull out a ball.

Much better to find another solution that will be easier for me to work with. After thinking about that for a while, I decided to purchase a smaller fold-up treadmill that I can place near my writing nook upstairs where it’s much warmer.

Then I can use that treadmill whenever I have a few minutes between projects to get my exercise in.

I’m excited to say that this solution is working much better. (I detail the treadmill I got and how it works in a future post.) I’m exercising more, feeling more energetic, and not beating myself up.

The point is to work with your stage of life—or your current circumstances—to make it easier to reach your goals.

How Thinking About Your Stage in Life Helps You Solve Problems

How might you use this idea of honoring your stage of life to make it easier to achieve your writing (or other) goals?

First, know yourself.

Don’t be like me and schedule something important in your day (like exercising) at a time when you are at your lowest energy point. Schedule your hardest activities at your highest energy point, then work around that for the rest of the things you need to accomplish.

Second, be realistic about where you are.

We can all be guilty of failing to realize the changes that have occurred in our lives, and imagining that we can somehow continue as we always have.

If there’s one constant in life, it’s change. It can help to take a day or two to reflect on what you need right now to make your life work for you, rather than feeling like you’re constantly having to fight against it.

Third, open your mind.

Often we get stuck in limited thinking. Then we start blaming ourselves when our plans don’t work out rather than searching for a better option.

Do some brainstorming. What other solutions might you be able to consider?

Fourth, look for tools that will help you.

I didn’t think of the fold-up treadmill idea until I happened to be browsing the internet and came upon a picture of one. That got my wheels turning and helped me come up with a different way to deal with my problem.

I’ve often found that seeking out a new tool can make all the difference when you’re trying to make a change in your life.

This can help with your writing too. Maybe a new writing book, piece of software, online idea generator, or something else may give you the spark you need to come up with your best solution.

Finally, stop beating yourself up.

If something’s not working, back off and take another route. Self-recrimination rarely does anything but make you feel worse. Instead, honor yourself and how you feel, then figure out how to work with that so you can still make progress toward your goals.

How have you honored your stage of life when setting new goals?