Overcoming Goal-Setting Struggles: Tips for Success

How are the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? – No, don’t run away! We can easily fix that!

If you are well on your way with your goals, feel free to ignore this post. Send it to someone who could benefit from it, instead. Also feel free to consider yourself as someone a small step above everyone for today. Well done!

If you, as most people, aren’t doing as hoped with your goals: Keep reading!

Relax, it’s not easy to do it all. Life has a tendency to throw things at us unexpectedly and we lose focus. 

Let’s take out the pressure and judgement. Instead, let’s put on our researcher glasses and dive into why things haven’t been progressing the way you hoped:

Ask yourself the following questions to continue making progress on the goals that matter:

• Could it be that some of the goals realistically don’t matter as much to me as I thought they would?
• Could I take a break or discontinue working on them?
• If not, how could I make it extra easy on myself to see the tiniest bit of progress?
• What is going well? Which goals am I still working on and how?
• What isn’t going well? Which goals am I struggling with?
  Is there something that successful goals have in common?
• Is there something that the less successful goals have in common?
• How can I use what helps me with the former goals to improve working towards the latter?

These questions should help you feel a bit better about yourself and increase your chances of making progress on things that matter to you. If they don’t, go over them again and ask yourself if you are still being too ambitious or optimistic about your future capacity to be productive. Be kind and be realistic! Your future self will thank you.

The difficulty of starting anew

Getting started is often the most difficult part of making a goal. The first time you begin with a goal it is difficult. Additionally, starting day-to-day. Many, if not most, people struggle for example to make the decision each time to start exercising. That is normal! So rather than berating yourself for still struggling, ask yourself what would make it easier.

There is a small, but helpful trick to overwrite your brains struggle with starting a task:

Pretend the easiest first step is all you need to do for a second. For example, if you want to exercise, tell yourself you don’t need to start for 45 minutes, but rather, just roll out the yoga mat. When the yoga mat is laying in front of you, you might as well go stand on it… And since you’re standing on it… You get my drift. 

Rather than looking at the overall goal of the task, look at the first seconds or single minute. This way you have already gotten started, thereby completed an essential and often extra difficult step of the process.

I hope you found this blog post helpful and are itching to start working towards your goals again, in a sustainable way!
If you think that you could use some extra help, you can get in touch with me and we can discuss adding a session or more to help you with your goals.

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash