Dealing with Goals When You’re Sick

Dealing with Goals When You’re Sick

by | Aug 24, 2020 | Uncategorized

Recently, I was sick. Luckily, it wasn’t Covid-19, but it did knock me down hard. I was sleeping a lot and had very little energy. I’d get up in the morning to do a bit of work, sleep and then do a little bit more in the afternoon, just to keep up with my “day job.” I didn’t have much energy to do anything else.

Especially with advancing my goals.

I did continue to look at my goals sheet each morning, although I missed a few days. Unfortunately, I didn’t move forward ANY of my goals for the month and the quarter. I missed many of my weekly (regular recurring) goals.

This is going to happen to all of us at some point in our lives. We get sick, we get knocked down by an unforeseen event, or have an emergency and it takes us out of action on achieving our goals.

 

 

How do we deal with this?

Relax

Any time I miss a goal, it bothers me. But beating up on myself during this time isn’t going to do anything. It’s going to make me feel worse. I did what I could and accepted I would have to recover once I got to feeling good again.

Recover

Once your body is recovered (or you’ve recovered from the emergency), take time to look at what you missed on your goals for the week/month/quarter. Accept that you missed some weekly recurring goals and move on. Now look at the goals that were moving you towards other, larger goals (what I call “chunked down” goals). What needs to get done? Can you move those to the coming week? Next week?

Refocus

Once you’ve let go of what you can’t get done, spend the energy on refocusing on the goals you have in front of you. You may need to double down for a couple of weeks to catch up. You may need to move a goal out a little further. The important part is to make sure you’ve looked at the plan and figured out how to get back on track.

 

The one piece of advice I would give other than the 3 items above is to make sure you’re still achieving one small goal regularly. For me, that was my morning stretching routine. It’s one of the items on my weekly recurring goals. It was small, but it was doable AND it kept my goal achieving muscle in use. And I believe that’s the key. By continuing to take one small step each day, you’re keeping forward momentum.

When you’re back to 100%, you don’t have to start from zero, you just need to get the momentum moving forward again.

#GoalsThatMatter