Goal Achievement – Is Step Number 23 Keeping You Stuck?

"goal achievement" "Gordon Bryan" "The Great Gordino"Does this sound familiar? You have a goal in mind. Great. You work out some steps to get there. Great. You realise you have no idea how to do one or more of the steps. Not so great. So you just give up. In this article I’m going to tell you how to get past this common problem…

In the title of the article I mentioned the 23rd step. Of course your goal path may not have 23 steps, it certainly doesn’t *need* to have 23 steps – your goal will have as many steps as it needs!

In fact I just picked the number 23 because it’s the 23rd of the month as I write this, but it is a high enough number to represent a step that’s far enough in the distance, and that’s the key to the point I’m making.

When you are working out the steps you need to take, you start off with the end result, and then work backwards in rough generalisations. Then you begin to refine those general steps into more specific actions, but you do not need to refine *all* the steps right at the beginning.

The journey to your goal will almost certainly be a winding one, with kinks you may have expected and kinks you definitely won’t have expected. Those kinks may push you further forwards or set you back, and it’s these kinks which mean you can only do so much planning.

As you work to define the steps backwards from your goal, you can keep to the generalisations, and only worry about really refining them as you get closer to where you are right now.

To explain that in a different way, you will need to know exactly what your next step has to be, whether that’s a phone call, an email (or heaven forbid, a letter!) or whatever. After all, you can’t take that next step without knowing what it is, right?

Don’t worry too much about step number 23 while you are still at step 1! By the time you get to step 5, step 7, step 9, step 23 will start to become clearer, and it will only get clearer still the closer you get to it.

If you know that steps way in the future involve skills that are way above your current level, then again, now is not the time to overly fret about it. Concentrate your focus on improving your skills at that current level, and leave the more experienced steps for when you have, er, more experience!

This fear of not being equipped for future steps is unnecessary, and it stops so many people from achieving amazing things. Think to your own goal – are you worrying too much about steps too far down the road, letting them distract your focus from the here and now?

That’s it for today – do leave a comment below with your feedback, and feel free to share, like, tweet etc!

‘Til Next Time,
Health & Happiness,
Gordon
P.S.Don’t forget you can sign up for email updates of posts via the box at the top right of any page.
P.P.S. Here’s another article about taking action – ‘Goal Achievement At 100 Miles An Hour!’

Do leave a comment!

Leave a Reply to Denys Kelley X

8 Comments

  • This is great! You remind me of two things. The first is that I heard a woman talking last year about how to write books and she said most people feel they need clarity before they start writing, whereas actually you get clarity by writing. Of course you need a certain amount to start! The other is the idea that if you come up against obstacles, it’s not a bad thing, just a sign you are moving along. if you didn’t meet any obstacles chances are you would be sitting still! I think fear of obstacles sometimes keeps us stuck. You explain this fear of being equipped in the future thing really clearly, thanks! H

    • funnily enough I can verify the point about writing books – it’s true with all writing actually, but when I wrote a novel years ago, I was struggling because I was trying to figure it all out in my head before I wrote it. As soon as I learnt to get writing and see where it took me, the shackles came off.
      Worry about being equipped will no doubt be in your book!
      Cheers,
      Gordon

    • Lots of different ways to get there Leslie, but fear of future hurdles can be a goal killer in any direction!
      Cheers,
      Gordon

    • Thanks Denys,
      One step at a time builds the experience that is needed for the steps further down the road, which in turn reduces the fear of those steps. You are right that this fear is a biggie, and it’s a shame that it stops so many people unnecessarily.
      Thanks for stopping by,
      Cheers,
      Gordon