Struggling to Reach Your Goals? 6 Steps to Get Unstuck
“Write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.” – Brian Tracy
Do your goals seem too lofty and far-off to reasonably achieve? Do you sometimes feel stymied by lack of discernible progress? Does this dearth of accomplishment make you lose interest and diminish momentum toward doing what’s necessary to get to the next level? It isn’t your goals that may need attention, but how you go about reaching them. Here are some thought-starters on how to make progress without struggle.
1. Review your list of goals to ensure they’re ones you really want.
“It’s better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than at the top of the one you don’t.” – Stephen Kellogg
Compiling a long list of goals you have no real desire to achieve is a worthless endeavor. Not only will you toss the list in a deep drawer never to revisit it, you’ll likely feel a twinge of guilt that you did so. Why? When everyone seems to want to talk about how much they want to do in life, how long their goal or bucket list is, you know that you’ve given short shrift to what you really want out of life. You have nothing to talk about, let alone motivate you to go beyond what you now know.
The simplest way to get around this is to dig out that list of goals and go through it, weeding out each one that hasn’t a remote chance of ever getting done and retaining those that may spark your interest, if only slightly. There’ll be time to flesh them out later. For now, you need to pare that unwieldy list to one that’s more manageable. In fact, if you wind up with a handful of life goals that you may be able to rework into some that will energize you, that’s making progress right away.
2. Single out a goal you want to achieve above all others. This is the one to focus on.
“This one step – choosing a goal and sticking to it – changes everything.” – Scott Reed
You must begin somewhere, and that starts when you identify one goal on your pared-down list that you most want to achieve. There’s no sense diluting your energy by trying to go after too many goals at once. By zeroing in on a single goal, the right goal, you’re honing your focus to a laser sharp concentration.
Note that you may need to sleep on this goal in order to allow your subconscious to link threads of possibilities for you to review upon waking. Why is this important? What may be a natural progression of steps might not be readily apparent when you first think about what approach to take with this goal. You may, for example, be tempted to jot down easy-to-do steps that may look like you’ll be making progress when, in fact, they’re more busywork than anything else. What you want is a coherent plan, something that makes sense while it also spurs you to action. This may seem like an impossible outcome, yet you’ll be surprised what your subconscious can come up with. Let it go to work for you.
3. Fan the fire within.
“When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
When you can’t wait to get started working on your goal, you know this is something you really want in your life. It will not matter how arduous the path or how many times you stumble along the way, the vision you have of success is firmly imprinted in your mind and nothing will deter you. What’s so beautiful about having this fire within is that obstacles that might otherwise stall momentum have little chance. Instead, novel solutions may appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
Granted, there will be twists and turns as you work towards the goal. That’s to be expected and is nothing to worry about. If you find that you’re making phenomenal strides with little effort and no problems, it may mean that your plan was so well-crafted and executed that nothing could stand in the way. On the other hand, it could also mean that the goal you chose was not lofty enough.
It is good to have minor goals, ones that you can work on and accomplish so you have a track record of success. Just be sure you always put in time on the highest-value and most-desirable goal as well.
4. All goals are possible – even those that seem impossible.
“What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve.” – Norman Vincent Peale
If there was no challenge, there would be no satisfaction in success. The journey to achieving a heartfelt goal is perhaps as important as the realization of accomplishment. Goals that rank as highly impossible, as compared with just impossible, a comment generally used to dismiss difficult, time-consuming or seemingly improbable goals out of hand, may very well be the ones that others will talk about for years to come. After all, didn’t the world’s great inventors put their energy into solving riddles that confounded, perplexed, and for which no answer seemed possible?
They didn’t give up. They did persist, with enthusiasm, determination and follow-through. As a study from the American Psychological Association points out, monitoring the progress made toward goals helps promote goal achievement, especially when such progress is recorded or written down.
5. Add variety to your action plan.
“The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.” – Cato the Elder
Researchers at the University of Sussex found that pond snails learned and remembered more when learning two totally unrelated tasks. How does this relate to making progress reaching your goals? By adding variety to the action plan you’ve put together for achieving the goal, you’re more likely to learn faster what works and remember it than if you keep doing the same step (or one that’s very similar) over and over.
6. Recognize that where you live is now.
“Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.” – Robin Sharma
Attaining that all-important goal may take some time, yet you do make progress on the end result with action you take today. This is, after all, where you live: in the here and now. Put your best work into making little improvements today. Do the same tomorrow. You’re bound to make progress – and it won’t even seem like a struggle. Research shows that immediate rewards today can help with long-term goal achievement.
*************************************************************************
This article was originally published on Psych Central.
Related Posts:
10 Health Benefits of Daily Exercise
10 Ways Nature Helps Your Well-Being
15 Ways to Increase Your Happiness
10 Tips on Reaching Your Life Goals
How to Tap Into Your Capabilities
To automatically get my posts, sign up for my RSS feed.
Want to get my free newsletter? Sign up here to receive uplifting messages and daily positive quotes in my Daily Thoughts. You’ll also get the top self-help articles and stories of the week from my blog and more. I also invite you to like me on Facebook, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest.