According to the University of Scranton, 92% of people don’t achieve their new years goals.
That includes yours truly.
The truth is that we all have goals that we want to achieve someday. However, making the meaningful changes required to hit these goals can sometimes feel impossible to do.
With that being said, let’s go over 3 of the most common barriers that we face and what we can do to overcome them.
Let’s dive in.
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We are not motivated to work towards our goals
“I have 0 motivation to write today.”
Despite that thought entering my mind on an almost daily basis, I’m on track to publish twice as many articles to this website than I did last year.
And that’s not from magically having more time on my hands. Since becoming a father earlier this year, I actually have a lot less time to dedicate to writing.
Instead, this increase in productivity has come from my new perspective on motivation.
Motivation is often viewed as a spark; a necessary precursor to creating a fire. We are reliant on that spark, waiting for it to magically show up and propel us to make progress towards our goals.
This is the easiest way to fail.
In order to make meaningful progress, we need to show up everyday. Spark or no spark.
We can do this by building goal-specific habits into our daily routine.
James Clear, Author of Atomic Habits, says it best:
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
James Clear, Atomic Habits
For me personally, this has translated to writing almost everyday. I don’t need motivation because it’s part of my routine, it’s something that I just automatically do. And because the act of writing has become a habit, I’ve experienced significantly less blogger burnout.
Whatever your desired goal, it’s important to build daily habits that facilitate progress. Don’t wait for the spark.
We don’t set realistic goals
When I first started writing for this website, my goal was to hit X page views as soon as possible.
That was my standard for success.
Despite busting my ass, I wasn’t successful in reaching that goal. I failed.
However, I was setting myself up for failure from the beginning. The number of page views I received was not something 100% within my control (google updates, degree of luck, etc.).
Pegging success to something beyond our control can crush our confidence.
As a result, to set ourselves up for success, we need set goals that are:
- Clearly defined
- Within our control
After learning this, I pivoted my definition of success to publishing X amount of articles. The criteria for this goal is clearly defined and 100% within my control.
Overcoming barriers to achieving goals becomes more difficult if we are not confident in ourselves.
However, confidence is a lot like compound interest. By getting some small and realistic wins under our belt, we slowly begin to feel more confident in our ability to achieve harder and harder goals.
We don’t trust the process and give up
It’s easy to give up when we don’t see immediate results.
We may even quote Einstein to justify giving up:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
However, we can avoid this mindset by focusing less on immediate results and focusing more on trusting the process.
To trust the process means to remain committed.
It means understanding that life is not easy and still showing up everyday. Even if we don’t immediately see progress.
This is not easy to do – we are naturally wired to expect instant results.
So when we don’t immediately lose weight, improve our diets or save more money – a sense of failure can creep into our minds. This can crush our confidence – increasing our chances of becoming apart of the 92% who don’t achieve their goals.
When I launched this website, it was a total ghost town.
For many new bloggers, this can lead to feelings of self-doubt and failure. However, I knew that if I stuck to my process of writing everyday, people would eventually find this website. And that’s exactly what happened.
Expecting to see huge results on a daily basis only leads to distraction and disappointment. We need to instead sharpen our focus and remain committed to the process.
Final Thoughts
By overcoming the challenges that we face, we are constantly redefining what is possible for us to accomplish.
We begin realizing that the things we once thought were “impossible” were just self-limiting excuses to stay inside our comfort zone. When in reality, overcoming barriers to achieving goals has a huge impact on our growth as individuals.
I started Time Value Millionaire in 2017. However, I didn’t publish my first post until 2020. I was scared to go outside my comfort zone because I thought I was going to fail.
When in reality, hitting “publish” for the first time ended up becoming one of the best decisions that I have ever made.
Thank you for reading! 🙂
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