Overcoming OBSTACLES

This month I am focusing on designing an ambitious goal. Because growing requires us to be disciplined, to fail and get over that failure. It requires us to get stronger. It requires us to build more neural pathways in our brain. It requires us to be aware, to be conscious and to pay attention.

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. Then constrain yourself to one of them, and 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. It’s okay to push that envelope a little bit. This step is one of the most important steps. You must write it down. I don’t have the research, I just know from my personal experience that when you get it out of your brain and onto a piece of paper, it suddenly becomes real outside of your imagination. That is powerful. 

Here’s your warning. As soon as you’ve written down your 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 pushing yourself beyond your current comfort zone. Your brain likes to maintain the status quo. That is what it was designed to do. 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. You come up against your fear, doubt, disbelief and shame, and know that that’s part of it; 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 this, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m confused. Maybe this isn’t the right thing. Maybe I should wait a while.”

What it means is 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.

If there are things that you haven’t quite got your finger on, then part of your action plan is to learn how to do those things. It’s really important to break them down into small steps. The more detail you can give yourself about your action plan for your goal, the better. Now, obviously, when I’m teaching goal setting, we take this all down to the nitty-gritty detail. 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, and 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 facing yourself and pushing yourself outside of 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 in the way. There is nothing that you genuinely want that you can’t have.