OBSTACLES

This month I am focusing on designing an ambitious goal for 2021. Many people have been struggling this year with feeling like their life has been on hold. They don’t feel in control of their lives. I think an ambitious start to 2021 is imperative for getting back in control and focusing on designing the life of our dreams.

 

The first step in designing an ambitious goal is to write down your 25 wants including objects, feelings, things you want that you already have, big dreams, crazy ideas, etc. From one of them, write down a very specific goal. Talk about timeframes, dates, and results. The more specific you can be, the better. Now, allow yourself to stretch here. Maybe think bigger than you’re really ready to believe.

 

Here’s your warning. As soon as you’ve written down your 25 wants, picked one of those and written a very specific goal, especially if you’ve stretched yourself with that goal, fear, doubt, and shame will come up. This does not mean anything has gone wrong. This is a normal part of the process, the most important part of the process. If negative emotions don’t come up, it probably means that you’re not stretching yourself. Your brain likes to maintain the status quo. It was designed to be efficient, to learn quickly and to adapt. As soon as you start introducing new things and stretching it and asking it to go outside of its comfort zone, those emotions are going to come up because you’re going to have thoughts that you haven’t normally had. You don’t yet have efficient thoughts to support this goal. That’s the point of having it. It’s not what you get from achieving the goal, it’s who you become. As you process through your fear, doubt, disbelief and shame, that’s where you learn. First of all, you learn how to process through that negative emotion. You also learn how to pay attention to your own mind as you go through goal setting, and that skill in and of itself is what will allow you to continue to set and achieve goals. As you set your goal and start noticing the negative emotions, you will also notice the negative thinking. Sometimes, it doesn’t alarm you because it’s not nasty. A lot of times, the thinking will sound like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m confused. Maybe this isn’t the right thing. Maybe I should wait a while.”

 

Setting goals and believing in them enough to achieve them will bring up OBSTACLES, and the things blocking us from our deeper greatness. When we reach our goal, we’re not going to be any better. We’re not going to be any greater, but we will have removed any OBSTACLES that are blocking us from knowing how great we are.

 

One of the things that is so amazing about setting goals and action plans to achieve those goals is not necessarily what you achieve when you accomplish the goal, but what Dan Sullivan calls ‘The Strategic By-Products’ along the way. As you are going through the process of achieving your goal, you’re overcoming your doubts, your fears, you’re taking actions, you’re putting yourself out there. You are going to have things happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise. You’re going to meet people you wouldn’t have met. You’re going to have experiences you wouldn’t have experienced had you not had this goal.

 

I want to invite you to dream. I want to invite you to be really specific and write it down. I want to invite you to allow the fear, shame and doubt to come up. I want to encourage you to write down the thoughts that come up that are OBSTACLES in the way of achieving your goal. Then take all of those thoughts and put them on the side burner while you go to the place where that goal is already achieved, and access the wisdom of your future self and how you were able to achieve it and then break it down into an action plan. In that process, whether you achieve that goal ultimately or not, you will become a more clear, clean, in touch, evolved version of yourself because you will have to go through the process of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. That is something I want for all of you. Who you are and who you actually express to the world will be so much more visible not just to you, but to everybody else if you’re willing to continuously set goals, write them down and overcome the mental OBSTACLES that appear along the way. There is nothing that you genuinely want that you can’t have.

 

That’s why I created the “Designing an Ambitious Goal” program, which includes a free guide, access to free accompanying lessons, and optional one-on-one coaching to help you design your ambitious goal and reach it in 2021.