The idea of achieving your goals and enjoying the things you have always dreamed of is enough to motivate you to act on your goals. But as you start taking action on each goal, do consider that there are possible barriers along the way. These hindrances can come from within you as the goal setter or it could be factors from the outside.
An important thing to do is to practice positive thinking. These barriers must not be treated as obstructions to your plans but take them as challenges. This way, you increase the drive or the need to really attain your goals. The nice thing about it is that when these goals are achieved, the feeling is more than satisfying. You will realize that it is all worth the efforts and hard work.
In this article, let us find out the various roadblocks to achieving our individual goals and the way to overcome these barriers.
Procrastination
This habit is probably the worst enemy of goal setting. Procrastination is a negative habit of delaying any action for a certain task, goal, or deadline. The term is synonymous to laziness. When you are assigned a task to be completed for today, you tend to set it aside for tomorrow. Procrastination makes a person unproductive. And when you are not producing results due to laziness, do not expect your dreams and plans in life to come true.
Remember that for goal setting to be effective it has to be measurable and time framed. Delaying the actions for your goal for no particular reasons will obviously result to not meeting the allotted time frame for that goal. Some of us may feel disappointed with the outcome, not realizing that it is in fact a product of our own doing.
If you demonstrate this bad habit, you must start evaluating yourself and the reasons why you procrastinate. If the goal seems a bit too ambitious to attain, try setting it to a lower type of goal. But if the problem is you, start changing your old habits of just sitting idly and doing nothing.
Lack of Motivation and Lack of Persistence
Motivation is a critical factor in attaining our goals. If we lack the drive or enthusiasm to act on our dreams, they become unattainable. Lack of motivation is failure to see an advantage or benefit in wanting to achieve a goal. When we feel that we cannot get anything good out of attaining our goals, we do not really work hard for it. How can we boost motivation within ourselves? The simple answer is to find a reason for striving to achieve our goals. The goals that we set must be dreams that we have always longed to achieve. And more importantly, we must know why we want to achieve them. Once we have a purpose in these goals, we become inspired to act on it.
Lack of persistence is very similar to lack of motivation in striving to aim for our goals. The difference is that having lack of persistence means we have found a reason to work on our goals but there is no willingness to do the tasks and actions needed to achieve them. Sometimes, it is the tasks or the steps needed in our goals that would stop us from striving for them. It could be that a certain goal may seem too meticulous, with detailed tasks, or it could be too complex for us to act upon. In dealing with this barrier to effective goal setting, it requires a paradigm shift or a change of focus from the tasks at hand to the benefits that our goals can give us once achieved.
Internal and External Roadblocks
Apart from the barriers to our goals mentioned above, let us identify other sources of difficulty to achieving our individual goals. Let us categorize them into two main groups: internal and external barriers.
Internal Barriers
- Personal fears
- Lack of motivation
- Lack of self-esteem
- Self-limiting belief
External Barriers
- Financial ability
- Lack of time
- Social norms
- Lack of resources
External barriers are factors that are not directly within our control but there is always a way to work our way out and turn these stumbling blocks into motivational factors.
