7 COMMON OBSTACLES TO YOUR GOALS AND HOW TO NAVIGATE THEM

Obstacles come in all shapes and sizes. Here are
some typical blocks to goal achievement:
1. Lack of creativity. You might have your 
struggles determining how to best work toward
attaining what you want. Perhaps you’ve run out of
ideas to make it happen.
2. Negative thinking. We’ve all been plagued by
negative thinking. You feel you will not
be able to achieve your dreams. Negative thinking
is a potent block because once it begins, it tends
to escalate and can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
3. Lagging confidence. Following closely on the heels
of negative thinking, sagging confidence is the
bane of goal achievement. You begin to seriously
question your skills and abilities to complete the
work required to reach your goal.
4. Focus follies. Who among us can claim we’ve
never lost our way on the path to our dream
life? We want to reach that milestone but we keep
getting thwarted by distractions. How can you
work on an important project when your wife
keeps asking you why you aren’t painting the
house or spending time with the kids?
5. Refusing to put in the effort. It goes without saying
that every goal requires you to work and
persevere to reach success.
6. Time traps. Making your way toward goals is
challenging enough without having the irritation
of not enough time to do it.
7. Vague aspirations. If you’re unsure about what
you want, it’s a challenge to continue
steadily toward your goals. Vague aspirations
equal unmet goals.
Now that you have a good idea of blocks you might
encounter on your way to goal achievement, use
these tips to overcome them:
1. Take responsibility to keep the creativity going. Draw
pictures of what you hope to achieve. Make a
storyboard of your plan of action. Design a vision
board of your goal pathway and
include how your life will differ after achieving
your goal.
2. Arrest negative thoughts. As soon as they creep in,
think, “Stop it now” and mean it. Then, replace that
negativity with an “I will persevere and achieve”
message. Tell yourself, “I can do it.”
3. Review past achievements. Give yourself props
for goals, you’ve achieved before. What were those
goals? Use these reminder techniques to find and
connect with your confidence.
4. Commit to goals. Remind yourself daily about why
you want to reach a particular goal. Perhaps you’ll
earn more money, get a better job, live in a place
you prefer, or protect your family’s future. Stay the
course by re-committing to goals each morning.
5. Work. Along with committing wholeheartedly to
goals, you’ve got to put in the work. Tell yourself
your effort will, in the end, be worth it.
6. Use your schedule. No matter what your goal,
consistently schedule the time to work toward it.
If you don’t keep a calendar now, start. Look at
your entire week or month and what’s scheduled
with a glance. Write in when you’ll work
toward goals.
◦ Maybe it will be Tuesday evenings from
7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. or Saturday
mornings from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Follow your schedule consistently.
7. Clarify goals. Write them and place copies
everywhere inside your house, briefcase, and
calendar. When you’re sure about what you want,
then you can diligently work toward those goals.
There will be obstacles to block the pathways toward
your goals. But if you can identify the sources of the
blocks, you can develop solutions or use these time-tested strategies to navigate those obstacles and claim
your success.
Our upcoming lesson takes a look at fear and the
problems that fear creates. You’ll learn that you don’t
have very many obstacles left in life if you can
successfully manage your fears.
• Choose three of the common obstacles in this
lesson.
• Make a list of examples from your own life
where you faced those same obstacles.
• How could you use the tools in the Navigating
Obstacles section to have overcome or avoided
those obstacles?