{"id":14463,"date":"2016-01-15T01:00:36","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T09:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/?p=14463"},"modified":"2016-01-14T13:03:13","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T21:03:13","slug":"a-recipe-for-writing-and-personal-success-by-carol-malone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/15\/a-recipe-for-writing-and-personal-success-by-carol-malone\/","title":{"rendered":"A Recipe for Writing and Personal Success By Carol Malone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Summer<\/a>Please welcome author and book coach in training\u00a0Carol Malone<\/a>. Today she\u2019s sharing her article regarding the New Year and those dreaded, but necessary resolutions.\u00a0Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Happy New Year!<\/strong> Time for resolutions and goal setting. Time for me to freak out. I\u2019ve always hated the words goal and resolution. Oh, I had them \u2013 the same every year: lose weight, save money, get out of debt. But I never thought about the plans, the schedules, the hard work it took to achieve those goals, so I bailed and failed and told myself that it was better not to have goals so I could save myself from anxiety and disappointment.<\/p>\n

But the New Year has dawned and I can\u2019t help but get the feeling everything is new and clean and fresh enough for me to start once more \u2013 clean slate.<\/strong> This year something feels different. I didn\u2019t get that awful sense I was a failure even before I started. I had an epiphany, a change of mindset. Whereas I\u2019d always been a little closed minded or had a \u201cfixed mindset\u201d as Beth Barany<\/a> calls it in her book editing workshop, I learned I can develop an open mind or have a \u201cGrowth Mindset\u201d ready to accept new possibilities IF I thought differently about them. According to Beth, a person with a \u201cGrowth Mindset\u00a0[will] measure themselves against how far they’ve come and celebrate each step they take.\u201d I liked that thought.<\/p>\n

I have come a long way in my writing<\/strong> career and I needed to celebrate my milestones, victories, and my learning experiences. It makes me tingle just thinking about my successes and anticipate more.<\/p>\n

Facing the proposition of setting another round of yearly goals had always left me cold in the past.<\/strong> What has changed?<\/p>\n

I was blessed with a wonderful mother who believed a young girl should learn to cook<\/strong>. We had a lot of hungry mouths to feed in my family. Mom and I were the only females in a house filled with males \u2013 my dad and four older brothers. They worked extremely hard on our chicken ranch, and come supper time, they were ravenous. And just like in cooking, there are steps or recipes to follow if we want our food to taste good and be appealing to the eye.<\/p>\n

To become a great cook, and I\u2019m not ashamed to say that I am a terrific cook<\/strong>, it took years of trial and error. Though I\u2019m not a \u201cworld-class chef\u201d only because I was never classically trained, I learned from experts in the field. With the push of a button, expert chefs come into my home and continue to train me in the culinary art of preparing masterpiece dishes to please the eye and pallet.<\/p>\n

All of us who write want our writing to be something special<\/strong>. We want to follow the \u201crules\u201d or \u201cguidelines.\u201d The same applies for having a balanced life. I wrote about this in my article for Beth\u2019s website Writers Fun Zone<\/a> <\/em>a while ago on how to have a balanced life. I found so many resources to help us work on balancing our lives so that we have balance with our financial, spiritual, family and friends, job\/career, health, psychology\/inner peace, emotional, and adventure sides to our lives. I found the information on getting back in balance on BeHappy101.com<\/a> invaluable.<\/p>\n

And as authors, we have one more area of focus: our writing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So how do we set goals, make projects, plan, schedule, and meet the writerly challenges we want to accomplish for the New Year?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many of you know Michael Hyatt<\/a><\/strong>. Perhaps some of you have taken workshops from him or listen to his valuable podcasts. He is a master teacher and an inspirational leader. I recently took his free webinar where he introduced his \u201c5 Days to Your Best Year Ever<\/a>,\u201d and I learned great stuff about goals and goal setting. Unexpectedly, the process didn\u2019t look so daunting anymore. I thought I could actually set some goals and maybe, with perseverance, achieve them.<\/p>\n

Then another thought hit me. I could combine my love of cooking with Michael\u2019s list of goal setting \u201crules,\u201d and make something that would taste good and be easily digested and healthy for me. A true recipe for success both in my personal life and in my writing career.<\/p>\n

So here is mine and Michael\u2019s Recipe for Personal and Writing Goal-Setting Success:<\/strong><\/p>\n