7 Common Obstacles To Your Goals and How To Navigate Them

Obstacles are unavoidable. We may think we can get around them, but good luck. This post accepts obstacles as reality and shares the most common obstacles you’re likely to face.

Having goals will help you achieve the life of your dreams. Some of life’s most satisfying experiences are those that involve staying focused on a goal until you achieve it. Yet you’ll likely experience times when, no matter how hard you try, you’re stymied by obstacles blocking the way.

Obstacles come in all shapes and sizes.

7 Common Obstacles To Your Goals

Lack of Creativity

You might have your own struggles determining how to best work toward attaining what you want. Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas to make it happen.

Negative Thinking

We’ve all been plagued by negative thinking. You feel you’re just not going to 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.

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.

Focus Follies

Who among us can claim we’ve never lost our way on the path toward 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?

Refusing To Put In Effort

It goes without saying that every goal requires you to work and persevere to reach success.

Time Traps

Making your way toward goals is challenging enough without having the irritation of not enough time to do it.

If you’re unsure about what you really 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.

7 Keys To Navigating Obstacles

Take responsibility to keep creativity going

Draw pictures of what you hope to achieve. Make a storyboard of your plan of action. Design a vision board of what your goal pathway looks like and include how your life will differ after achieving your goal.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 quick glance. Write in when you’ll work toward goals.

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.

Here’s what you need to do today:

• 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?

Each hurdle I pass makes me stronger.

I take every challenge as a learning experience that can help me find my way through the next time it comes around.

I embrace each negative situation as an opportunity to sail right through if it ever raises its ugly head again.

I admit to feeling frustrated when the same difficulty keeps coming my way. I sometimes feel like throwing my hands up and calling it quits when it seems that certain obstacles are here to stay.

But before I give in to the urge to give up, I stop and consider the fact that I made it past the hurdle the last time. That success gives me the strength I need now. It gives me the experience and strategic thinking to know how to conquer it the second, third or fourth time around.

My resolve to conquer and move on is incomparable!

I know that each time I conquer makes the next time that much easier. I come out of every battle with the bruises of experience and the armor of confidence that guarantee I can come out a victor the next time around.

Today, I embrace the hurdles that come my way as I aim for my goals.

I recognize that achieving a goal by overcoming difficulties is more fulfilling than attaining one with a lack of challenges. I feel confident that I have the inner strength to persevere and hit my targets, regardless of the detractions in life.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. Have the hurdles in my life made me more appreciative of what I have accomplished?
2. How do I empower my peers to persevere?
3. Am I confident that I can overcome any negative occurrence?

There will always 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.

Written by Paul McCoy, Paul@tidalcoach.com