7 Psychological Reasons You Can’t Stick To Your Goals Successfully
Why do we have trouble reaching and sticking to our goals?
You might be a person who sets goals or makes vision boards to show what you want to do and achieve.
Still, six or twelve months later, you beat yourself up by saying, "I haven't even started. "Why haven't I done this yet?"
This can make you feel stressed, sad, and like a failure in general because you haven't reached the goals you set for yourself.
So here are 7 reasons you can't stick to your goals and ponder upon so you can find what is holding you back to reaching them.
1- With your goals, you focus too much on the end result.
James Clear makes a brilliant point that we should pay more attention to the systems we use to reach our goals than to the actual results.
For example, if you're trying to eat healthier, pay more attention to sticking to your plan than to the end result you want.
It will make you pay more attention to what's in front of you instead of what's in the sky.
2- You express your goals as negative statements.
It's hard to achieve a goal that says "don't get caught in this stupid trap."
That doesn't motivate you, and when you're just starting out, you need motivation to keep working toward your goal.
Make your goals positive, like "Be a friend who says "yes" more often" instead of "Stop acting like an idiot around your friends."
3- You make it impossible to reach your goals.
If it's too far away to reach, you won't try to reach for it.
Sometimes, what we did in the past can tell us what we'll do in the future. This means that if you haven't changed a behavior in a week, don't set a goal to do so.
You can do a lot of things if you put your mind to it, but it will be much easier if you know what you can do and base your goals on that.
4- All the work you have to do to reach your goals makes you feel down.
When you only look at what's in front of you, you can lose sight of the big picture, which is why you're doing what you're doing and what you want to achieve.
By learning how to look at your daily small goals through the lens of the big picture, you'll be able to keep your motivation going for a long time.
Never lose sight of the whole.
5- You live in a place that doesn't help you achieve your goals.
In their book The One Thing, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan say that environments are made up of people and places.
They say that these two things must work together to help you reach your goals. If not, they would get in the way of your goals.
So make sure that the people around you and where you live help you reach your goals instead of getting in the way.
6- Having Too many goals
Having too many goals can make you tired, lose your focus, and make you not want to do it anymore.
I get it. It's exciting to start a new habit or a new thing with so many possibilities, right? I mean, how does anyone ever do just one thing? (If you haven't seen, I have a lot of trouble with this.)
But if your plan is to do "everything," you won't end up doing anything.
It's too much. We are not machines.
There are things like feelings, bad days, and times when you doubt yourself. You've probably already had a few of these...
Concentrate on one thing. One goal a month, since it takes at least that long to come up with a goal.
Trust me, at the end of the year, it's better to have 12 good habits than 200 habits you tried to start but never got the hang of.
7- Setting Goals against Your Values
We also become trapped with our ambitions because we focus on things that don't fit us.
We're not considering our values or interests.
Our personalities? What attracts us? They're what we should focus on, but we often make goals based on what we think we should do or what our friends or family have told us is a good objective.
Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself, "What makes me passionate?" I'm excited where? Joy?
The idea is to stop and look at what you value—not honesty or integrity, but what genuinely makes you happy?
What interests you? Social media distractions reveal our interests. Where can you lose yourself on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram and say, “Whoa, did I waste that much time?”
That shows your true interests, and that's okay. You must accept that because it's your personality's DNA.
That will help you match goals to your values and basic beliefs, making them more achievable.
