What is the real reason you are not achieving your goals?
You are good at setting goals and start strong in working towards achieving them but continue to fall short. This can cause a high level of frustration and sometimes cause you to stop working towards your goals. To get back on track you need to understand the underlying reasons that you can’t quite get there.
Consider whether or not you have too many goals. I don’t think there are an absolute number of goals that will drive you to success, but I do know that when you have too many, you can’t give enough time and attention to any one of them. Several years ago, I outlined ten goals that I wanted to achieve in the next five years. A few of them were relationship-oriented, such as “be a better mother/aunt” and were more about changing my attitude and communication. This type of goal can be worked on all the time as you are intentionally adapting your interactions and it is not a big time-suck. But some of the goals were big ones that did require a lot of time and I chose just two of those to focus on in the short term. Those two, retiring and becoming a life coach, I was able to accomplish.
Another thing to think about is whether you have a fear of failure which can keep you from trying. You may think, “I have never done this before and, if I fall flat on my face, people will laugh.” A perfect way to figure out if you have failure fears is that you won’t speak your goals out loud. The thing is, when you have a dream, you may fail before you succeed. The key is taking what you learned and modifying your approach. If your goal is aligned with who you are as a person, then dream big and share that dream with others! They will likely support you and cheer you on.
Finally, stating the obvious, inactivity will lead to a lack of goal attainment and could be related to a couple of things. First, is your day-to-day life too busy at this moment to pursue your dream? If so, give yourself some grace in recognizing that now is not the time and set a longer time horizon to work on that goal. Second, you might not be committed to the goal in the first place. If you set a goal to run a half marathon because your best friend is but you hate running, it will be very difficult to accomplish the goal. Be honest with yourself, is the goal really for you? If it’s not, then move on and be okay with that. Spend some time reflecting to figure out what you want to do.
Goal achievement is linked to prioritizing the right goals, at the right time and understanding that you will fail before you succeed. If you keep this in mind, then you will find success in achieving your dream.