When you set goals and start moving toward them, there are two points where they are most likely to fail.
The first is right away. Right at the start of your new goal, you may find it was too ambitious; you may find that you don’t have the energy and you might fail to let your plans get off the ground. This can lead to a false start and eventually cause you to give up entirely.
The other failure point comes later on. This is when you’ve been living that life for many years. It’s when you’ve started to grow tired of it, and it’s when you’ve just lost your motivation. Come year three you might just have forgotten all about your move to change, and you might have found other things took over in your life, and you got distracted. It’s easy to drift off course this way.
So how do you keep your goals alive and keep moving toward them?
Reviewing Your Goals
One thing you need to do is to keep reflecting on what you’ve accomplished so far, to keep reviewing your goals and to keep adapting yourself to meet your changing lifestyle demands.
This is something a lot of people struggle with. When we’ve worked tirelessly toward one goal, it can be very difficult to switch then to another goal! It feels fickle, and it feels like a betrayal of who we are.
Except it’s not. People change. Situations change. And our goals should change too. If you keep working toward the same goal because you feel you can’t change course, then you’re going to have the same problem as if you work toward a goal to impress your Mum. If it’s not what you want in your heart anymore, then you won’t get what you need from it.
More often than not, though, you’ll find that your new goal just needs tweaking. It’s the same mission statement, just a new expression of that desire. Just like a company has only one mission statement, but it has a lot of different products!
The other thing to do is to review your progress and to debrief what went well and what didn’t. This will allow you to restructure your plans to suit your circumstances better. It will let you see what works and what doesn’t and it will ultimately allow you to make your goals even smarter and even more achievable.
