7 Reasons Why You Are Not Hitting Your Goals..
You want to start living the life you are in love with.. so you made a vision board, set your goals and then before you knew it time had flown by and life got real REALLY quick. The flutters of excitement and motivation to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals and that vision you were so set on feels like a distant memory and you’re not really sure where or why you’re not accomplishing what you set your mind to.
Sound all too familiar? Well.. don’t let the self doubt or discouragement settle in just yet. We are going to give you the clear adjustments you need to make to stop getting in your own way and start achieving your goals today!
YOU ARE SETTING UNREALISTIC GOALS
We get it.. You have a big vision for your life and you want to achieve every bit of that vision. Although, deciding that you are going to completely change everything about your life in the matter of 3 months or 30 days because some guru told you it only takes 21 days to create a habit is not an effective way to set goals.
You need to focus on incremental growth! You will get much farther ahead on your path to success if you just focus on getting just a little bit better every day or every week. Rather than setting your goals with the mindset that you are going to go “hard core” every single day, then end up burning out by the end of week.
You can achieve anything you set your mind to! Just make sure you’re setting yourself up for success.
YOUR GOALS ARE NOT SPECIFIC OR MEASURABLE
If you cannot specifically tell at any point in time whether you are on, close or off track to hitting your goals then they are not specific or measurable enough.
For example..
Don’t just say..
“I want to grow my following on social media”
Change that to..
“I am going to gain 300 new followers on my Instagram account by November 28th”
(Then actually write out the exact social media strategy you are going to see through, write the milestones you would need to hit and by when and how you are going to track the success of achieving that goal)
Ask yourself the following questions to tell whether your goals are specific and measurable:
- Can you track this goal regularly?
- Would it be clear if you did or did not accomplish your goal?
- What would you need to specifically do on a daily/weekly basis to achieve your goal?
- When will you achieve your goal?
- Could you put your goal on a timeline with specific milestones or steps to achieve it?
YOU ARE SETTING TOO MANY GOALS
Again, when your vision is to create the life you are in love with there are usually a lot of different areas of improvement that you want to achieve that goes into that. Whatever you do, please do not choose too many goals that you are setting out to achieve in the same time frame. Even if you are giving yourself “plenty of time” to achieve them, you are only setting yourself up to be distracted. Think about how busy your life and mind is already and how much free time you actually have in a day to expel. Adding 5 different goals from various areas of your life is likely going to overwhelm you.
When you are setting your goals, go ahead and write out those 5 or 10 things you want to achieve.. But then you need to minimize that list! Doesn’t mean you are not going to achieve your set of goals. It only means you are going to achieve them like building blocks, building a strong foundation, and layering one set of them at a time. Select 1-3 of those goals that you deem would be the most impact or meaningful to you that you are going to focus on right now and achieve those first.
YOUR GOALS WERE INFLUENCED BY OTHERS
With vision board parties, family expectations, and the lives of others on social media at our fingertips, it is only human nature that we may find ourselves following a path we never really chose ourselves. Unfortunately, it is common that we subconsciously set goals or expectations for ourselves that in reality we don’t personally care for achieving. Sometimes this may even look like setting a goal because we feel like we should care or want to achieve it even.
If you have that one goal you have put on your list every single year, subconsciously just writing it at the top because it sounded good and every year the desire to achieve it fades within or after the first month.. chances are that you may not actually care about achieving that goal. You may also have that one goal that you put down to please your partner or your parents or the community/culture you are a part of. You don’t seem to have genuine desire or excitement for that goal and it may even make you exhausted to think about or even that its out of your control or not your choice.
Well, you are not helping anyone by leaving that goal on your list and especially not yourself. Others opinions of your success, lifestyle or achievements should never out way your own. You are the only one who has to live your life from beginning to end.. let your life be about you and what you want!
LACK OF MOTIVATION TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS
You should feel excited, even thrilled about the idea of achieving your goals. You want to be able to envision yourself achieving your goals, what it would feel like to be able to achieve them and how your life would change in or after achieving them. So if you are setting goals that are achievable and specific, you know exactly what you are going to do to achieve them and you genuinely care about achieving that goal.. and yet you find yourself unmotivated or unwilling when it comes to doing the work, it is time to work on your mindset around achieving your goals.
I will first be very cliche and say you need to establish your why and remind yourself of it daily! Yes, you have probably heard this before but it is true. You need your brain to associate not only the goal but the work that is needed to achieve it with the feelings of accomplishment and the desires that are in your heart. So get deep, figure out truly why you want to achieve the specific goal. How will it change your life? How will it sculpt who you are? In what ways will it fulfill your purpose? Get down to the root and actually implement putting that vision in front of you daily! This can look like a vision board, or a piece of paper on your nightstand, writing on your mirror, a photo on your phone, casting the vision in your journal or even just visualizing in your mind when you wake up what it looks like to achieve that goal. There are many options here, but whatever it is that you do, it needs to spark emotion within you and more importantly you have to actually do it.
So I am going to sound like I am completely contradicting what I just said and also tell you.. you need to be disciplined. Having motivation can spark discipline but you are realistically not going to be motivated to achieve your goals every day. Now don’t throw motivation and visualization out the window, you need them! Although, there are going to be days where you just don’t feel like doing the work and you have to decide that you care more about who you are going to become on the other side of that goal then you do about the temporary moment or feeling of not feeling like it.
Remember it’s going to take a different version of you to develop the discipline needed on a daily basis to accomplish your goals. You have to challenge yourself! The vision for your life needs to be strong enough to endure and surpass those temporary moments stopping you from doing the work.
FEAR OF MISSING THE GOAL
Belief that you will achieve the goals you set out for yourself is crucial! If you set goals that you don’t even believe you will achieve, chances are you won’t. The subconscious mind is very powerful so if you are subconsciously fearful that if you dream too big maybe you won’t accomplish all that you want or even that you will put in all the work with no reward.. you just told your mind to sabotage your game plan. Then when you go to put in the work to achieve your goal, you’re constantly in battle with yourself.. you wont give your 100% towards actually trying. If you actually don’t believe you will achieve it, then there is no need to try and if you don’t try then theoretically you don’t have to fail because you never believed it anyways.
This cycle can go on for way too long in everything you do for so many people! Build up your self belief and reprogram your mind to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to. If you struggle with this, you need to invest in developing your mindset and confidence then just be willing to take the leap! Start with positive self talk, affirmations, reminders of what you have already accomplished in the past, dissecting the roots of why you have disbelief and debunking them.
DESIRE FOR INSTANT GRATIFICATION
You know you set a goal that is going to require a lot of work for you to complete, and you knew it wasn’t easy but haven’t fully come to terms with the concept of time or visible results. So every time you put in the work to achieve the goal and you don’t see the results as fast as you want to see them, you begin to stop doing the work till eventually your not working towards your goal, then something reminds you one day that you care about it and you go and try again, don’t see results as fast as you want to see them, then on the cycle goes.
Setting the goal → Working towards the goal → not seeing results → giving up → time goes on → resetting the goal..etc.
With any goal, especially ones with great impact.. you may not see even the slightest bit of visible results until accomplishing the goal. You have to come to terms with the fact that you may not see any results until you achieve the goal and that is okay, it will take time. If you are doing the thing you need to do to get there, then you need to release perceptions of how much time you think it is going to take and fall in love with the process.
It makes sense that you want to see the fruits of your labor, it takes hard work to achieve your goals and you want to see it all come together.. But just like a rose; the roots grow beneath the ground long before you ever see anything above. Focus on the small milestones of achievements on the way to the goal and find ways to celebrate yourself and your hard work along the journey.
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