Failing Forward

I failed at my goal of writing every day in November. I missed Friday and Saturday before I even realized it, then Sunday was here and pretty much gone and I didn’t think about it until late that night. I think that night I made a pretty conscious decision to quit. I mean, if your goal is 30 days straight and you fail on Day 15, it’s over, right? Your goal is unaccomplished. So why write on days 17-30? 

That’s how I have always thought. For me, the biggest battle with everything is mental. I have these grand ideas and plans, and sometimes I even start them, but I seldom carry them out. And the reason I don’t is that if I blow it along the way, I consider it over, written off, done. I realized this about myself a few years ago, and so the adjustment I made at that point is breaking my big goals into small steps. Instead of “Get healthy”, I focused on going to bed at a decent hour during the second half of 2016. In 2017, I made it a point to drink more water. In 2018, I cut down on my sugar intake. In 2019, I had to reevaluate and refocus on the previous three, plus work on my mental and emotional health and rest, plus halfway through that year I added intermittent fasting as a weight loss attempt. Now I’m ready in 2020 to work on physical fitness. If I had tried to do all of these things at once, I would have failed immediately because it was too much change at a time, and as soon as I failed at one or the other, I would have scrapped the entire plan.

I’m now trying to teach myself that failing doesn’t mean you can’t start again. In fact, you aren’t even starting over, you are just continuing toward the end goal. My pastor’s wife talks about “failing forward”. We are going to fail, but it’s important that we fail forward and keep making progress, even in our failure. 

So, here I am. I’ll be four days short in my 30 day goal. In fact, I may be even more than four days short, depending on future failures. But I’m back. I’m here today. I’m writing. I may have failed, but I failed forward, and failing forward still moves me in the direction of my goal.