Excel Training & Consulting

Goal-setting is not sexy. From my experience when dealing with clients only a very small percentage set goals and an even smaller number tend to follow through. What prevents people from setting goals? Here’s a list of common reasons I’ve compiled based on what I’ve heard from people over the years.

1. You’ve experienced past failure. This is the big one for many ex-goal-setters. Often people have set goals in the past and have failed to achieve them. They’ve since decided it’s easier not to set goals in order to avoid any further feelings of failure.

Solution: People fail at achieving goals for many reasons: Unrealistic goals, lack of action, no action, inflexibility, lack of resilience, lack of or no strategy, the goal is not in line with a person’s values and so on.

Failure is a part of the goal process. If you’re expecting everything to fall in place without a glitch you’ll be mightily disappointed every time. This is especially true if there are elements outside of your control, such as other people or weather. Don’t judge the failure. Learn from it and do things differently.

2. You’re too spiritual to set goals. You live in the now. Planning takes you out of the now.

Solution: Plan in the moment. Enjoy the process of planning. Planning can be fun and exciting and you can then enjoy the process of achieving your goals.

3. You don’t have time to set and/or achieve goals. You’re way too busy to sit down and write down goals – it’s just another to do list.

Solution: You’re too busy not to! If you set goals in line with what is important to you (your values) you may find yourself being less busy and more fulfilled. It may get you off the treadmill of life and towards having more meaning and value. For example, if health is really important for you but you don’t spend enough time on this area you could set a goal to walk regularly instead of doing something that is not a priority.

4. It’s too hard to achieve goals. You’ve got plenty of things on your plate so travelling to Peru, running a marathon, learning Japanese and earning $100,000 a year are beyond you.

Solution: Change your strategy. Break things down into bite-sized pieces. If your end goal is to travel to Peru, look at it in simpler steps, actions you could take in the short term e.g. visit travel agent, or start a savings programme, or go online and research the best places to visit in Peru.

Why Should We Set Goals?

1. Setting goals will increase your chances of getting what you’re after.

Goals are simply about being conscious or aware of things in our life we’d like to improve or have more of. Our brains like targets. In fact our brains work this way. When you try and think of something you don’t want it will think of that e.g. don’t think of a pink umbrella. What happened? Pink umbrella! In other words our brains have a tendency to move towards things, even if that thing is something you don’t want.

2. Goal-setting is really nothing more than being conscious of something that we want to change. Much of our behaviour is automatic, it’s habitual. If your life is perfect then keep running on automatic pilot. If you are human and you want to grow and expand or make positive changes in your life: set goals. And once you are conscious of something you can then carry out an action plan in order to achieve it.

Happy goal-setting!!