Goals That Survive a Bad Season

The season hasn’t gone the way you planned. The goals you set in August are either out of reach or feel very different now than they did then.

So what do you do with the goals?

You have a few options. You can abandon them, which produces drift. You can pretend the gap between the goal and the reality isn’t as large as it is, which produces dishonesty. Or you can ask which of your goals can survive what’s actually happened — and recommit to those.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Though. The word carries everything. Though the harvest has failed, though the livestock are gone, though every external measure of success has collapsed — yet I will rejoice. The foundation of Habakkuk’s joy is not the results. It’s something that survives the results.

The goals that survive a bad season are the ones that don’t depend on the results for their value. The process goal — the commitment to prepare fully and compete with everything you have regardless of the outcome — is available on a 2-8 record as much as an 8-2 one. The formation goal — the character you’re building in how you handle difficulty — is more available in a hard season than an easy one. The relationship goal — the investment in teammates and the team culture — often has its most significant moments in the seasons that didn’t go according to plan.

Recommit to those goals. Not as consolation prizes for the outcome goals that didn’t work out. As the goals that were always the most important ones — that are still fully in front of you regardless of what the record says.

The season hasn’t produced what you hoped. It hasn’t taken away what matters most. Stay in the field. The goals worth keeping are still there.

Recommitment exercise. The spoken commitment has more weight than the internal one.