Top 3 Mistakes People Make in Setting Goals
Learn to Trust Yourself as You Create the Habit of Personal Accountability
We set goals to achieve things that are important to us. Setting goals and achieving them are two very different things.
Have you ever spent New Year’s Day creating goals for the year? Were you excited about the prospect of the positive changes in your life that would result from accomplishing them?
By February were you disillusioned and disappointed because it wasn’t happening?
Great News. It’s not your fault!
3 Common Mistakes That Will Result From Listening to the Goal Setting Gurus
In this article, you will learn to identify these mistakes and how to pivot to alternatives to ensure your goal-achieving success.
Mistake #1
Identify your goal and write it down.
Sounds great. It’s conventional wisdom that writing down a goal increases the chance of achieving it as opposed to just thinking about it.
Here’s the problem with that.
Think about building your dream house. You have found the perfect lot. Your architect has drawn the perfect plans to turn your dream home into a reality. You are so excited to break ground. You are especially excited about the master bedroom on the second floor.
The day construction begins you are on-site just filled with excitement. You pull the construction foreman aside and share your excitement. Then you tell him that you are especially excited about the master bedroom and you want him to build that first.
Can you hear his incredulous laughter as he tells you he can’t start even framing the master bedroom until the foundation and the first floor are secure?
Setting goals without them being supported with a secure foundation is no different than trying to start building your dream house focusing on the master bedroom first.
The foundation for your goals is knowing who you are at your very core and creating a roadmap (goals) to take you where you want to go having linked this to your core with a powerful why.
But First
Before we go onto mistake # 2 consider this. Goals may be accomplished in the short term, but without a secure foundation they will not be sustained over the long term and they will come crashing down just as surely as that master bedroom would.
Mistake #2 Use Your Goals to Create Affirmations
Affirmations are great. They create top of mind awareness. What could be wrong with that? How could that possibly be a mistake? It’s not. It is just woefully incomplete.
Without being linked to an emotionally powerful why and a personal commitment to yourself they are nothing more than a bunch of nice-sounding but hollow words.
In mistake #1 we alluded to an emotionally powerful why. Without this depth of feeling, there will never be a compelling need to do the difficult or the inconvenient consistently. Consistency is imperative to propel and sustain change. Goals are all about creating permanent changes. Consistency is essential for this to happen.
This is all about personal accountability. We are honorable people. We keep our commitments to others. Too often we find ourselves overcommitted and so we put our commitments to ourselves on the back burner as a result. Achieving goals means we must learn to keep our commitments to ourselves.
This means being mindful in making commitments — to others and to ourselves. We are not super hero's capable of doing everything. We are human beings seeking to make a difference in our lives and in the lives of others. This is why we set goals.
As I tell my clients in The Power to Choose to be accountable to ourselves, without rationalization, is the magic bullet to achieving goals. Since the power, we have to choose who we are, where we are going, and who we will become represents our ultimate freedom accountability represents the key that unlocks the door to that freedom.
Wow! Given all of this is there really another common mistake in goal setting? Do you remember the famous line in response to a child’s question; “Yes, Virginia there really is a Santa Claus.” So yes. There really is a 3rd mistake.
Mistake#3
There is a common attitude that says “whatever you don’t accomplish this go-around is where you start the next to go around”. If you have overcommitted and consequently set yourself to fail this seems reasonable but it is incredibly destructive.
What you are teaching yourself in that process is that you can’t trust yourself to keep promises to yourself. Trust is a foundational principle in all healthy human relationships. Would you choose to stay in a marriage, a partnership, or a friendship where your partner in that relationship had proven themselves untrustworthy? To choose to do so would be incredibly destructive to your self-esteem.
Yet in the scenario above, where unachieved goals are simply rolled over, not only are you teaching yourself that you can’t trust yourself, you are teaching yourself that it doesn’t matter. Can you think of a more soul-destroying thing to teach yourself than that you don’t trust yourself and it doesn’t matter?
This is the anthesis of creating an environment for the achieving of goals.
If You Are Ready to Change Your Life & Actually Achieve Your Goals Then It Is Time to Take Action
Step #1 Absolute Clarity
Know who you are, where you are going, and why. Use The 7 Pillars of a Happy & Successful Life to confirm or achieve it. This creates a secure foundation to support your goals.
Step #2
Use the 7 Pillars to create a 10-year goal. Reverse engineer that to 5-year, 3-year, 1-year, and 90-day goals. 90-Days is an actionable time frame. Reverse engineer it back to what you will do today to move you towards that 90-day goal.
The Bottom Line
The Momentum Planner was designed to be your personal accountability buddy and support you in this process. To learn more about The Momentum Planner, Click Here.
Bonus Tip
Create an action plan every morning. This is not a to-do list. It is 1–3 specific things you will do today to move you towards your goal for the week.
Every evening have a personal accountability session with yourself about how you did on your action plan for the day.
Are you an entrepreneurial woman looking for a fearless family to support you in your dreams? Check out my FB group https://www.facebook.com/groups/fearlesswomenentrepreneursconnect
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