Achieving your goals: what’s stopping you?

You may be very clear about what goals you want to achieve. You may have drawn up your plans and know precisely the steps you must follow to get from A to B,  yet you remain stuck where you are and are unable to make the shift you want.  What can you do to make a difference and move yourself forward to reaching those goals?

1. Have you set realistic goals?

Sometimes your frustration about not moving closer to what you want is because you have set goals which are beyond what you could achieve at this time. Does this mean you should give them up completely? No, what it means is it might be a good idea to set yourself interim goals which you can achieve more readily. Interim goals are the steps you need to take to move nearer to your ultimate vision for your life. It may seem too daunting to aim immediately for your big picture that you get stcuk and don’t take any action at all.

2. Have you got the skills you need to achieve what you want to do?

It’s great to have a big vision, a dream of how you want your life to be and yet part of  being realistic is to come to terms with your current skills and whether you will need to either learn more or delegate  some tasks to other people. Either of these options is fine. Some people prefer to learn everything that might be needed as they move forward while others would prefer to offload some tasks to people who can do them quickly and efficiently. For example you may decide you need a website in order to make progress with your goals.  So you have the choice of whether you learn how to do this yourself or delegate to a web designer to do this for you. Considerations might be the expense of the different options, how much you want to be in control and how clear you are about the various possibilities including the level of difficulty in learning an entirely new skill.

3. Have you done your research?

Some projects never get started because you haven’t been clear about the different options open to you, the pros and cons of those options and the time involved in carrying them out. It’s important to find people who have done what you want to do and talk to them about what was easy to do and what was difficult. Of course it may not be the same  for you because you are coming from a different life experience but it’s useful to  find out what has happened to others.