7 Crucial Steps To Overcoming Barriers To Achieving Goals

If you’ve ever felt blocked when it comes to goal setting, this will really help. Here are the crucial steps to overcoming barriers to achieving goals.

Most people do goal-setting wrong. Most people treat goal setting like an activity they should just do once a year and then magically expect the goal to manifest at the end of the year.

I’ve been there myself and after 10 years of having online businesses, I have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to goal setting. I have made most of these mistakes myself so you’re not alone.

Here are the 7 biggest reasons why you have failed to achieve your goals.

1. You Didn’t Believe You Were Capable Of Achieving Your Goal

Why is it that some people set goals and easily achieve them and others fail to make any progress towards their goal at all despite the same amount of work and effort? 

The answer is that the people who achieve their goals are the ones that believed they could achieve their goals.

This point is absolutely critical.

If you have more doubts than you have confidence that you will achieve your goals, then you will not achieve your goals no matter what actions you take.

Even if you don’t believe in the law of attraction, most people would agree that if someone keeps telling themselves they won’t achieve something, then they won’t achieve it.

Henry Ford got it spot on when it said

Whether you think you can, or think you can’t you’re right.

Napolean Hill was famous for saying:

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Does that mean if you have a single doubt about your ability to succeed that you are doomed to failure?

No, not at all, but it would be better to have as little doubts as you can.

This is because the subconscious mind will bring about whatever you tell it, so if you are telling it both success thoughts and failure thoughts it will be convinced by whatever has the most energy.

That means that if you repeat ‘I will achieve my goals’ a thousand times each day, but carry around a constant feeling of dread about your business all day long, the subconscious mind will be convinced more with the feeling of dread than the empty words with no feeling attached to them.

That’s why it’s important to attach a strong feeling to your success beliefs. The more successful, happy and abundant you can feel about your business and your entire life, the more likely you are to succeed.

So here’s a trick you can do if you start to worry or think negative thoughts about your business.

Immediately say in your mind the opposite statement of the worrying statement and imagine yourself doing something that makes you very happy. That will help to reprogram your subconscious mind to start believing good things about your business.

It is totally normal to have doubts. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. But we want to do whatever we can to have more positive beliefs about our business than negative beliefs or we will struggle to achieve our goals.

2. You Focused On Getting Money Before You Gave Value

Here’s a big mistake I see a lot of people making. It is also advice that is given out by a lot of gurus that I really don’t agree with.

Most business experts will tell you the first thing you need to think about when starting a new business is the revenue goal, how much will the business make.

I believe this should never be the first step.

Although mindset and beliefs are absolutely critical, when it comes to business, you will never make any revenue by sitting on your sofa believing it is going to happen, if that’s all you do.

If you believe very strongly that money is going to come to you, it might come to you as a gift by a friend, or by winning a competition. But never by business revenue.

That is because the whole purpose of a business is to give people something they want, in return for money.

So instead of focusing first on all the money you are going to get, you need to first be focusing on what you are going to give.

What value are you going to provide?

How are you going to blow away your customers?

What makes you so much better than the competition?

If you don’t have an answer to these questions, you’re not ready to be setting a revenue goal yet because you don’t deserve to be given revenue when there is probably someone out there doing things in a better way than you.

I don’t want this to discourage you either if you are struggling to understand how you can be different from everyone else.

It might be that you do just as good of a job of providing value as the competition, but perhaps you communicate that value in a better or more interesting way.

Perhaps your marketing is better so the customer understands exactly what the benefits are of working with you.

Don’t forget that you yourself are an asset so if you have a business where you have contact with the customer such as coaching, then your own personality is always going to be the differentiating factor because different people resonate with different people.

If you have low self-esteem, yet you bring your personality into your business with blog posts, videos, social media posts in your own voice or some type of coaching, it is critical that you improve your own confidence before you will make any substantial amounts of money.

However, some people with low confidence can set their prices very low and improve their confidence just by securing one customer. You will find you can easily raise your prices as soon as your confidence jumps to the next level.

3. You Focused On Giving Value Before You Grew The Right Personality Traits

This is a big mistake that I made for many, many years. I have an enneagram personality type 3, known as The Achiever.

This means that I am ultra-productive and am very good at just getting tasks done.

This is a good trait to have as long as you are focused on the right tasks!

For many years, I listened too much to other people and focused on so many different business models, and totally forgot who I was serving, and why. I also forgot to listen to my own inner voice as to what was the best course of action for my business.

So I had some of the right personality traits for creating a successful business.

I was dedicated, consistent, hard-working, optimistic, and open-minded.

But what I was lacking was leadership, confidence to make my own decisions, and analytics and measuring were something I didn’t focus very heavily on as I was too busy doing work to figure out what was working and why.

So it is very important to figure out what you are good at and what personality traits you still need to develop to be successful.

Here are some personality traits needed to be a successful entrepreneur. What do you still need to improve?

1. Be open-minded
2. Stay focused
3. Be grateful
4. Be resilient
5. Be analytical
6. Be self-reliant
7. Be confident
8. Be driven
9. Be passionate
10. Be goal-oriented
11. Be honest
12. Be an informed risk taker
13. Be caring
14. Be a good leader
15. Be balanced
16. Be healthy
17. Be a good problem solver
18. Be optimistic
19. Be a life long learner
20. Be adaptable

Focusing on improving yourself as a person is the biggest gift you can give to your business. Once you get stronger as a person, you can take those skills into any business and make a success of anything you set your mind to.

4. You Didn’t Make Goal Setting A Habit

How many times have you written a goal down on New Year’s Day or during a course or coaching session and then never looked at it again?

I have done this so many times I’ve lost count. While I was moving house I came across about 30 different journals all with different goals written in them from the last 10 years. Most of them I never looked at once I wrote them.

You get results based on what you focus on so it stands to reason that if you don’t make goal setting a habit, you won’t be able to achieve your goal.

Looking back at the times when I have achieved my biggest goals, I literally reviewed my goals once or twice every single day for 6 months or more. This is what I did with my first business and my growth just exploded.

What I suggest you do is to write down your goal on an index card and review it twice a day.

I put my goal card in my bathroom and I made a habit of reading it out loud after I brushed my teeth in the morning and at night.

On my goal card, I wrote down the date that I was going to make a certain amount of money and what value I was going to provide in order to receive that money. Then I felt the feeling like I’d already achieved it.

Within 6 months of starting my new business, I was getting over 2000 page views per day and within 9 months I was getting around 5000 page views per day to my website despite my stopping working on my website while I was pregnant.

5. You Didn’t Put Goal Setting First

Have you ever got to the end of a very busy day and wondered exactly what you achieved and why?

That’s the problem with endless to-do lists. It is very easy to add busy work to our to-do lists that has absolutely nothing to do with achieving our goals.

If your goal is a revenue-based goal, then you need to focus on making money every single day. I call this MAST. MAST stands for Marketing And Sales Task. Unless you are focusing on MAST every single day, you are not putting your revenue based goal first.

I suggest you have more than one to-do list. One of your to-do lists is literally a brain dump. It is everything that you want to and think you should do for your business. Ignore this list most of the time.

The other to-do list is your daily to-do list and it should have 1-3 tasks on there and MAST should be one of them.

Of course, you can outsource MAST to someone else, but someone in your business should be doing this daily and you should be planning MAST once a week.

Seeing as you’re in business to make money, revenue-based goals should be the main priority for you at all times.

You might have other big goals too but revenue should always be one of them.

6. You Didn’t Have A Realistic Plan For Achieving The Goals

I’m always in two minds about the word realistic. I’m not actually a big fan of the word as I feel like it limits us into thinking too small and that can limit our businesses from growing too big.

However, I feel like the biggest reason that people give up on their goals is that they set goals that were too big for them right now and got disappointed when they didn’t achieve them.

How many times have you written down a goal to be a six or seven-figure business owner when you are literally earning nothing?

I’m not saying it can’t be done. People have proven that anything is literally possible and businesses can indeed reach six or seven figures in their very first year.

But it takes a very confident person to carry forth this achievement. Often that person will have had success with another business or area of their lives and they are very determined.

I myself did create a six-figure business in my very first year by thinking big, so I have proof it works.

But after talking to many other business owners, and seeing my own results slip, I realize that your mindset has to be in exactly the right place for this to happen.

So now I like to take a bit more of a gentle approach to goal setting. I have had so many disappointments that I am now at the place where I do think big for the long term but am also a bit more gentle with myself in the short term.

I was in a very very confident place when I started my first business and after a decade of knocks and disappointments and also victories, my confidence is not exactly where it was 10 years ago. I am more confident in my abilities, but less confident in my mindset so I go easy on myself.

Being realistic means assessing your own level of confidence and meeting yourself where you are. That doesn’t mean you don’t work on improving your confidence, but right now you can set goals that feel achievable but yet push you out of your comfort zone.

When you start a brand new business, just making any money at all is a major victory. So focusing on small wins at the start can give you a huge amount of confidence. You can then use that confidence to set even bigger goals that stretch you to the next level.

This is what I mean by being realistic.

When you set a goal to achieve seven figures, have you given any thought to how you will actually achieve it?

If you set a goal to achieve seven figures in 10 years, fair enough, you have more than enough time to grow into the person who has the ability to earn this amount of money.

But if you set a goal to go from nothing to seven figures in one year, for most people this is unrealistic. This is because it takes a very strong mindset and a lot of experience to run a seven-figure business.

How many customers will you need to have? How much will you charge them? How will you support them all? Who will do customer services? How will you have time for that amount of customers? What if they all demand support at the same time? Is your team big enough? Is your host large enough for the amount of traffic you’ll get? Do you have a pot of money to support experimentation with paid ads? How will you build a big enough audience to sell that amount of products? What happens when you have a failed launch? What will you try next? How will you be resilient enough during tough times?

If you have sensible answers to all of these questions and don’t feel totally out of your comfort zone then you are ready for big goals.

Otherwise, give yourself some grace. If you are new to the world of business, it takes some time to learn all these skills. You can learn them faster than you think but you do need to learn them, and often the best way to learn is through trial and error, but better to fail fast when you’ve got nothing to lose so you can figure out what doesn’t work and keep trying new things until you learn what does work.

When you figure out what works, scale scale scale and you’ll succeed.

7. You Tried To Achieve Your Goal Without Any Support

Being an entrepreneur is the ultimate self-development program. You need to develop so many different skills and it can be really tough to keep motivated when things don’t work out as planned.

Having a support system in place is crucial so you have someone who can encourage you to keep going.

Do you have a supportive partner or other family members? A business coach is the best option for support in your business, but if you can’t afford a coach right now, why not try swapping services. You coach someone and they coach you for free, or they coach you and you offer them a different service.

How about joining a membership or a group coaching program as they can be a lot more affordable.

Even finding a supportive Facebook group is better than nothing but having people you actually have a conversation with is so much better.

When I had a coach I was really on fire as I felt like I had made an investment in myself and I would be wasting the money if I didn’t use that time to really work on achieving my goals and pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

This was the period of time when I started making videos for the first time. Before that, I hated being on camera and just having the support of my coach really made is easy for me to experiment with new things.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve got everything you need to get your mind in the right place for success with your goals, you might be looking for the right tools to set your goals and actually achieve them? I have a free gift for you that you’re going to love.  For a limited time, I am giving away the planner that I use to set goals for my six-figure blog.

Click here to get your free business goal planner.

Conclusion

I hope this has helped to give you some pointers as to what has been blocking your goal achievement efforts and what you can change in the future.

Goal setting is a massive passion of mine, and I have many more posts and videos to help you reach your goals so stick around and see what else I can help you with by checking out the links below.

Related Resources You Will Love

• What Is Holding You Back From Achieving Your Goals?

• 7 Crucial Steps To Overcoming Barriers To Achieving Goals

• Why Manifesting Your Goals Is Inevitable

• MAP: Keep Calm And Focus On Your Goals FREE E-Course

• 100 Most Motivating Goal Setting Quotes For Action Takers

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