Setting Goals For a Personal Life
Life on the road has a way of shaking loose anything that isn’t bolted down, including your goals. One month you’re home with a plan, a rhythm, a sense of direction. You’ve got your list written out, your priorities straight, the motivation showing up at the right times. And then the phone rings. A gig opens. You say yes. And in an instant, everything you built slips through your fingers. That list you were locking into? Gone. The structure you were building? Interrupted. The motivation you finally felt returning? Hijacked by airports and hotel keys and long days where your body keeps going but your brain is somewhere two steps behind.
It’s one of the weirdest paradoxes, how you can have all the time in the world when you’re unemployed, lots of mental space, and then all the mental space disappears the moment you’re working again. You end up slapping the switch back and forth like a light switch, hoping the next click will stabilize something inside you. Meanwhile, your mind rocks like a boat trying to stay upright in waves you didn’t plan on.
By the time you get back home, the goals you had feel like relics. The honey-do list is waiting. The world kept moving. And instead of picking up where you left off, you’re left with this weird, disorienting question:Which version of me made these goals, and where did they go?
That’s the part people don’t really talk about. The identity-shifting. The mental whiplash. The way personal goals quietly dissolve when someone else’s schedule powers your life. It wasn’t until after Brianna passed that I saw how deep this went. How much I had tied my own sense of direction to the rhythm of the job. When everything stopped, when I didn’t have anyone to care for, no tour to dive into, no role to hide behind, I realized I didn’t actually know what I wanted anymore. What mattered to me, independent of work, of grief, of obligation.
That was the first time it hit me: If you don’t create goals that belong to you, life will hand you a script and you’ll follow it without question.
Goals aren’t just tasks. They’re anchors. They give you a shape when everything else keeps shifting. And the road, with all its beauty and chaos, has a way of stripping you bare until only the essential pieces of you remain. If you haven’t defined those pieces, you get lost fast. The unpredictability of this life isn’t the enemy, but you can’t pretend it isn’t there. Your “pie of life” is never going to be balanced. Something will always take up more space than it should. Work. Travel. Grief. Loneliness. Burnout. The constant resetting of routines you barely got a chance to build.
That’s why goal setting matters, not because it makes you productive, but because it gives you a thread to hold onto when life goes off script.
And here’s the trick: Your goals have to be able to move with you. If they depend on perfect conditions, they’ll die every time the bus starts moving. This is where most people get it wrong. They build goals that only work at home, only work on good days, and only work when the schedule behaves. But this lifestyle doesn’t behave. It doesn’t care if you’re finally feeling stable. It doesn’t care if you’ve been waiting for the right moment. It doesn’t pause, so you can catch up.
You need goals that function like carry-ons, light, flexible, and able to survive turbulence. A big mistake we make is thinking goals need to be grand. They don’t. They need to be consistent. They need to remind you who you are across cities, crews, seasons, grief, change, and the 2 a.m. loading dock moments when you’re questioning everything. And on the road, consistency is a luxury no one is handing you. You have to build it yourself.
What they don’t tell you is that the hardest part of goal setting isn’t the discipline. It’s the re-centering. It’s coming home after a run and trying to reconnect with the version of yourself who cared about something months ago. It’s picking up a goal that went cold and warming it back to life without shame. People at home don’t see the emotional reset it takes, how foreign everything feels at first, how much effort it takes just to reintegrate. You crave stability, but you’ve been living a life where stability is temporary. You crave meaning, but meaning keeps resetting every time you say yes to the next show.
That’s why creating your own goals, small, personal, internal, isn’t just important. It’s non-negotiable. Your job gives you direction, structure, and purpose. But it’s not you. The crew becomes a family, but they aren’t responsible for your long-term growth. The tour gives you meaning, but it won’t tell you who you’re becoming. Only your goals can do that.
And the truth is, the people who struggle the most with this lifestyle are the ones who never learned how to track themselves outside of work. They let the road define them. They disappear into the gig. They rely on the intensity of the job to fill the gaps that real goals should have filled. And when the tour ends, they collapse into a version of themselves they don’t recognize. Goals give you continuity. Continuity gives you identity. Identity gives you direction.
And direction is the one thing this life doesn’t hand out freely.
So how do you create goals that survive the chaos?
Make them portable.
If the goal requires a perfect environment, it dies the minute your itinerary changes.
Make them personal.
Not goals your boss wants. Not goals your family wishes you would pursue. Yours.
Make them tiny.
Small goals survive turbulence. Big goals break under it.
Make them forgiving.
If you miss a day, or a month, you haven’t failed. You just paused.
Return to them after every tour.
Reconnecting with a goal is part of the goal.
At the end of the day, personal goal setting isn’t about achievement; it’s about anchoring yourself in a life that constantly asks you to reinvent who you are. It’s about having something that steadies the sloshing, something that reminds you there is a you outside the gig, outside the grief, outside the next city. In a world that flips your switch without warning, your goals become your light, the one thing that stays on, even when everything else goes dark.
Learn more about Nicholas’s work at TheNickStrand.com and ChooseY
Editor's Note: At StageLync, an international platform for the performing arts, we celebrate the diversity of our writers' backgrounds. We recognize and support their choice to use either American or British English in their articles, respecting their individual preferences and origins. This policy allows us to embrace a wide range of linguistic expressions, enriching our content and reflecting the global nature of our community.
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