Goals: What are you willing to give up?

Anything worth keeping is worth fighting for, the saying goes.

If you want to give up a habit that has plagued you for a long time you have to give up the habit.

Goals are no different. The reason that most of us fail at successfully goals is that we are more focused on what we want to achieve and completely leave out what we need to give up or sacrifice to become successful at reaching our goals.

Most often we rush into setting unattainable goals due to emotional reasons. As a result, we do not take into consideration the challenges that are involved or the elephant in the room that we have to get rid of.

Once upon a time, my perception of goalsetting was very limited. Setting goals meant racing to the finish line without any thought of what it took to get there. I just did not want to think about the hurdles. I’d tell myself that I would deal with situations as they occurred. I was wrong. What I did not know then about setting goals was that I needed a blueprint to guide my path.

Because I did not have a real plan the excitement would wear off just as it started and I would be back at square one with the idea on the back burner – rinse and repeat. I had drifted on and off setting goals and abandoning my goals so many times that I lost count. What I was doing at the time was role-playing, believing that I was doing the work when all I was doing was lying to myself. But the time came when I knew that I had to start to take things seriously. Yes, everyone has a time when they finally realize that playtime is over. That’s when it changed for me.

I am almost certain that, like me, most of you have been faced with similar situations. We often rush into making a list of everything that we want to accomplish without giving much thought to the process of planning, what constitutes effective goal-setting is how we are impacted by the process.

In conversations with women, I found that the general understanding of setting and achieving goals is somewhat limited. I found that some women tend to think of goal setting as a to-do list on which they check off items as they go along.  They often fail to ask themselves these hard questions:

1. Why do I want to set goals, what is most important at this point in my life that is pushing me to do this?

2. How will setting goals impact my life and those around me, what is going to change?

3. What do I have to give up or I am willing to completely remove from my life to succeed and am I prepared to commit to doing this?

I came to realize how critical it was to consider the influence of the people, things, and circumstances in my life that contributed immensely to my lack of commitment to serious goalsetting and goal implementation. I used to take the process for granted and would believe that I was smart enough to commit to my goals regardless of distractions. It did not work, I failed all the time.

Two things competing for the same space at the same time leads to failure – one will have to concede. When we plan to accomplish a certain goal we must plan to give it our all and our best. That is the only way to succeed. Goals cannot coexist with distractions or the things that hold us back.

As it is with making any tough decisions in life, always keep in mind when planning to take on a goal that something will have to give for the goal to be accomplished. We have to let go of or change everything that has held us back from doing the right things in the first place.