It's the first week of April, which means for me, it's time to sit down and evaluate my personal growth as well as my goal-setting and productivity. Balancing writing and real life isn't always easy, and managing goals with chronic illness often means giving myself grace and self-compassion—especially when I'm struggling to meet writer goals in the face of creative burnout.
I haven't always had self-reflection without shame, but I have always had a growth mindset, and that's a major part of why I love setting quarterly goals. It's about progress over perfection, goal setting with intention, learning how to set realistic goals, and developing the emotional resilience to practice self-compassion in hard seasons. It's about redefining success, and choosing grace over guilt. Missed goals may be a fact of life, but they don't have to feel like the end of the world.
Which is good, because in this goal review from the first quarter of 2025, I'm giving several missed goals grace for the sake of both mental wellness AND productivity. Here's the scoreboard on my goals for the first quarter of 2025:
Honestly, three out of five goals felt like failure, and I debated not sharing this post at all. I think I could have let it slide by and most people wouldn't even have noticed...but I pride myself on having the courage and the openness to share my author life behind the scenes. I know I'm not the only one still learning to balance accountability with kindness—and I like to think that in sharing my end of quarter reflection, I can offer you some encouragement in how to bounce back after failure and reset your goals while giving yourself grace. Because in the end, growth and reflection are the real accomplishments anyway, even if they take longer than we expect.
In my house, 2025 began with a wave of illness that felt a little like germ warfare before it was over. We spent most of January battling the flu, which worked wonders for my housekeeping and decluttering goal but really put a damper on my editing goals for STILL FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM. In February, my daughter and I went hard after resetting and catching up on overdue medical appointments—but six appointments, three birthdays, and the mental pressure of falling behind on my writing goals wore me down, which meant I stayed behind. March rolled in with spring break and psychotic weather; between chronic illness flare-ups, caregiving and ministry responsibilities, and the March 2025 storm system that stretched all the way from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border, my typical daily schedule got completely wrecked.
Let me tell you, that spring weather chaos felt like a metaphor for my mental state too, because I was struggling. By the end of March, I was writing through discouragement because I knew there wasn't enough time to complete my goals, but I was also actively working to give myself grace for missed goals because I may be a lot of things but I am certainly not a quitter. I leaned on my faith, kept up with my Bible reading plan, and promised myself a productive reset was on the way.
And yes, I did celebrate the wins, not only in the goals I did meet, but in the way those first three months felt despite falling behind. I spent time with friends. I laughed until my belly ached. I watered my plants, I grew my platforms, and I loved my people. But now, it's time to put that first quarter behind me and set my focus on my goals for the second quarter of 2025:
You might have noticed that some of those goals are directly recycled from the first quarter, while others are adapted to complete goals I didn't quite meet—and that's okay. The first takeaway from how to learn from failure is to accept that failure is a given. We can't all win all the time. It's just reality. But even when you take the L, you suck it up and you keep trying. You don't quit on yourself or the person you're hoping to become. You don't give up, even if reaching your goals feels like it'll take forever.
Remember that success is progress, not perfection; you can acknowledge discouragement without surrendering to it. And it's totally okay to own missed goals while choosing to move forward with grit and grace.
So with that being said, I'm signing off to work on those Q2 goals! If you're setting goals for work, personal growth, or even just better self-reflection, I'd love to see them in the comments below. And I hope as you set and work toward achieving whatever your goals might be, you'll...