Three Ways to Overcome the Obstacles Blocking your Success
Uncertainty overwhelmed me as I was handed the new task. Several days passed and the problem felt impenetrable. But the pieces slowly came together, line by line, and finally I found myself unconsciously giving myself a high five. I had, quite literally, cracked the code. As a software developer this experience is frequent, you’re given a process to implement, or code to debug and you hop on the roller coaster again. This, however, has been essential to helping me maintain the belief that everything is possible with enough determination and effort.
“Everyone should know how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think” — Steve Jobs
Here are the three lessons I’ve picked up over the previous few years that have helped me be more successful in achieving my goals—
1. Strengthen your mindset that your goal IS possible to achieve. This requires patience, lots of awareness, and most importantly building trust in yourself. To accomplish this, documentation is invaluable.
Since college, I have consistently kept a journal. Maintaining a journal has been crucial in identifying and stopping negative patterns. For instance, glancing back at my past journals I’ve been able to observe my history of creating new goals, getting excited, then hitting a rut and not following through. But by recording this, I was able to make this behavior more visible earlier and address it.
This brings me to building trust in yourself, this history has negatively impacted my trust in my ability to achieve my goals. To rebuild it, I’ve work on smaller goals, that I can achieve sooner and more easily. By continuously achieving smaller goals in your life, as they evolve and get larger, you’ll have built this foundation of trust that you will achieve them. I’m striving to apply the attitude that I already have around coding. Every time I look at a new coding problem I go into it with the mindset of this seems impossible but I know I will solve it, because that’s always been the story. I have never been able to say to a client, “No, sorry I don’t think that functionality is possible.” No I’ve had to solve it. Start believing in your capabilities and honoring your commitments like you would for a client.
2. Start the process of identifying potential barriers to achieving your goal. The obvious examples — lack of money, time, resources. Maybe you’re afraid to chase this goal? Perhaps worried that it won’t pan out to what you wanted. Thinking of past goals you’ve set and exploring the reasons that you didn’t achieve them might help you identify some reoccurring patterns that are blocking you. I’m someone who frequently gets the comment, “If only I had a nickel for every business idea you come up with.” Which I love my creative mind, but at the same time it can block action. When you have numerous ideas it can be difficult to know which to pursue, and you might start one and then gravitate to another. This divided attention can prolong or inhibit fruition of your goals. Another gigantic obstacles we often face is our fear of judgement.
“Living in fear or judgement is not how I will spend my life. Realizing that this life is all I get and your life is all you get, brings a need to make the best of all possible.” — Giancarlo Stanton
Whatever your repeated blockers are, name them so you can tame them as they would say.
3. Get logical about your outlandish goal. Asking questions is one of the best ways to improve your logical thinking. Start questioning how to break down your “outlandish” goal into logical steps and the the tiniest of steps. Steps which feel more attainable. For instance, your goal mostly likely involves hard work, so waking up earlier may be necessary. One of the tiniest step might be to set your alarm across the room from your bed, and if it’s cold in the mornings, put your robe out, easy to grab. Or maybe purchase a planner if you don’t already have one. Something I actually really love is using ClickUp to help achieve my big goals. ClickUp is a project manager, and you can break your goals into smaller tasks and develop milestones. Ultimately, you have to start looking at how all your small actions throughout your day are, or are not contributing to your big goal. It’s funny because despite the fact that we are constantly anticipating the future, rarely present in our thoughts, our actions don’t reflect this as much as you would expect. For instance, our immediate actions often favor instant gratification. We think about the future and what we want to achieve but then we procrastinate in the now. Building small actions which do reflect your objectives for the future is a huge accomplishment.
Trying to anticipate the outcome of your actions will also help develop logical thinking skills. For instance, if I plan to wake up earlier and don’t develop a plan for my morning the night before, honestly, I’ll typically fall into a social media spiral when I wake up. When I do create a plan of action, I end up being much more productive. This is because again, writing down our goals makes us more likely to achieve them. Checking a box has an immeasurable influence.
Attentive thinking is an additional quality of a logic person.
“‘Many mistakes in reasoning are explained by the fact that we are not paying sufficient attention to the situation in which we find ourselves,’ writes McInerny. The logical person has thus trained [themselves] to always pay attention to the details — even in situations that are familiar — lest he make a careless judgment.” (Lattier, 2018)
It’s evident that these three tips go hand in hand with each other. And documentation, specially through journaling, is a common theme through out. So if anything, starting a journaling to help you achieve your goals, is the one piece of action I really hope you take away from this piece.
Lastly though I do want you to remember that not completing a goal is okay. Something I wrote a while ago on my vision board was this:
This vision board is a tool to foster creativity and motivation. It is here to help you visualize your aspirations and propel forward your life’s voyage. And it is here to hold you accountable, so that time does not escape you.
Although, Remember –
Daily we aspire for coveted destinations. Yet often in our effort to achieve we are left tirelessly working, often wishing moments by. When we aren’t careful we fail to recognize that we’ve arrived. Every day of your journey, remember, some aspect of where you are now was something for which you once desired.
Also,
Life cannot be perfectly mapped out, and even if it could be so much excitement would be lost. Of the goals which change, the habits that inconsistently come and go, and the unpredictable obstacles which may obstruct or prolong fruition, forgive yourself.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post! I’d love comments on one of your biggest goals! And hopefully spark a conversation on further ideas for accomplishing goals.
