You have goals and good intentions, but you often encounter these top five obstacles to your success. Let’s acknowledge them and find a strategy to overcome them!

Every year, quarter, month, or week, depending on our habits, we jot down a list of goals we hope to achieve. Our goals often relate to our weight, our spiritual lives, our relationships, or various business objectives. While we start out with good intentions, we are bound to face a variety of snags along the way.

I would venture to say that these complications strike different chords for all of us. Our temperaments and just our general outlooks on life all play a small role in our approach to overcoming these hurdles.

So here are the five obstacles to your success that you and I often face when we have our sights on a specific goal.

Comparison

These days there are so many places that we see what we characterize as others’ success.

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Pastor Steven Furtick is quoted as saying, “The reason we struggle with insecurity is we compare our behind the scenes to their highlight reel.”

When we’re in the throes of changing diapers, throwing frozen pizzas in the oven, struggling to find or keep a job, watching the numbers on the scale creep up week by week…Insert whatever scenario is our real life existence and we are all guilty of comparing current to state to someone else.

Here’s the thing – We have no idea what’s really happening behind the scenes in other people’s homes. We don’t know about the fight they had with their daughter before school. We don’t know about the burnt dinner they threw in the trash. We don’t know about the bills they’re struggling to pay.

Yet, we battle with the thoughts in our minds that tell us we’ll never be good enough. We’ll never have this or that. We’ll always be a fat slob. (I’m just repeating things that have been said in my own head.) We’ll always feel like we’re broke. We’ll battle mom guilt because our kids don’t make the honor roll or didn’t make the cut for this team or that team. Again, the voices in each of our heads say very different things to each of us!

Complacency

Often we reach a certain place in our goal chasing and become complacent. Maybe we aren’t exactly where we’d like to be or haven’t achieved that precise goal, but what we’ve accomplished is good enough for us.

Anyone else do this?

We lose a little weight, our clothes start to fit better, but we start snacking a little more.

We reach our minimum quota for the month, but we quit pursuing any new clients.

We hit a new PR for our 5K, but our training starts taking the back burner.

We learn a new chord progression, but stop trying to learn any other new chord progressions.

Whatever our endeavor, it’s easy to get lulled into the routine and monotony of what we’ve been doing to get where we are. We often become so complacent in our pursuits that we never fully reach our goals.

Just like that constant hum of a ceiling fan, we get lulled into mediocrity because our goal-getting activities reach a certain level of mundane and familiar. Frequently we get bored with what we’re doing day in and day out. That boredom lulls us into complacency!

Busyness

Anyone else feel like they’re just too busy? Busyness is the most significant obstacle that sidelines me in pursuit of my goals.

Busyness creeps in like a thief in the night. Our calendars fill up with business commitments, practices, and games for our kids, extended family obligations, etc. Before we know it, we have zero free time to pursue the things about which we’re passionate!

In no time at all, we are exhausted and have little energy left to even think about our goals. Heck, we are often too busy to even write our goals on a piece of paper.

Even our most important habits and relationships suffer when our schedules get overcrowded!

I’m experiencing this now. My in person organizing client load has picked up tremendously. As a result, many of my other interests (like growing the blog) get boxed out because I simply don’t have the time to devote to them. It grieves me, but apart from waking up at 4am every day, which isn’t an option for me, I only have so many hours in the day to give to it all.

Lack of Direction

We’ve all heard the saying, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”

Too often we live our lives this way – aimlessly going through our day-to-day lives without any real purpose or sense of direction.

Maybe we’re just afraid of failing or letting ourselves down so we simply neglect to establish any sort of goal. Maybe aimless living is so commonplace for us that we never even think about what direction we’re going or where we want to be a year or 2 from today.

Deep down, we all have hopes and dreams. Yet, we fail to establish a path or a plan to make those hopes and dreams a reality. Honestly, our lack of vision and busyness often go hand in hand. When we’re too busy to take time to reflect and plan and even dream, we neglect to establish clear-cut action steps to get where we want to be.

Unfortunately, the longer we wander through life without any intentional focus on our end game, the harder it is to get back on the right track! We settle for the status quo. Here’s a newsflash – we are never too old to do something new or try a different approach.

Surrender to Defeat

This final roadblock, surrender to defeat, paralyzes many of us.

We fail at hitting the mark we’ve set before us and just give up.

We try to lose weight for the umpteenth time and don’t see the success we want. We just quit and eat our feelings away with a gooey warm brownie. Listen, I’m a serial dieter! (I almost typed cereal dieter and that would’ve been true, too!) I know the ups and downs and the just give-up conversations I have with myself and my husband all too well.

Our business venture presents more setbacks than successes. We throw in the towel and apply for real jobs, where someone else is our boss. 6 months ago, I thought I’d never get my organizing business off the ground in a new city. I ashamed at the number of pity parties I threw for myself.

Weight loss, business ventures, promotions, athletic goals, potty training a toddler, teaching a child to read, paying off a financial debt…Every one of these undertakings inevitably leads to setbacks or poopy pants!

Giving up is for sure the easiest way out!

I don’t know where you find yourself today or what setback or success you’re experiencing. I do know that it’s so important for us to be aware of these obstacles and roadblocks. We’ve gotta be vigilant because complacency, comparison, busyness, lack of vision, and surrender to defeat are tempting roads to walk.

It’s not too late to turn around. We need to pick ourselves up and try again…and again…and again…and again. Let’s get laser-focused on our goals! Let’s not let these obstacles derail us from experiencing the success and sense of accomplishment we want in our lives.

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