10 Reasons Why You are Not Achieving Your Goal

An action plan is to a goal what road signs and maps are to a destination. If you don't have an action plan you are not likely going to achieve your goal. You should know exactly what steps you intend to take to achieve your goal and if possible in what time frame. If you want to study more effectively you would likely need to take certain steps to achieve that. The same also, if you want to lose weight or save more money or run the 100 meters within 10 seconds.

You Lack That Really Inspirational Story

One good thing the past masters did for us was to leave footprints we could use to guide us. Life is impossible without inspiration. Often times we only spring into action when the other guy tells us that he actually did it. This is because, when we are not getting anywhere with a goal, we tend to think that it is actually impossible and then we abandon it. But when we hear that someone else had done it we begin to believe that it is possible.

You are not achieving your goal because you are not angry enough. You are not achieving your goal because you lack the motivation. You are not achieving your goal because you lack that fire.

We need to know about how a Bill Gates made it; we need to know about how an Abraham Lincoln endured it; we need to know about how a Muhammad Ali surmounted it, during those low moments of our lives, in order to have us fired up. After all if they could do it then why can't we? If you are not the type that cares about reading about the lives of the Great then your goal could receive a new lease of life if you start doing so. Reading the lives of people I admire is something I love doing. I like to see the crucial decisions, the associations (and dissociations) that they made in their path to greatness and achievement.

You Have Too Many Goals and Lack Focus

It is not as if having many goals is bad but there will always be a problem if you want to do and achieve many things and cannot get your priorities right. It is just like running several applications on a computer system and expecting it run efficiently. It would keep skipping from one application to another till so overloaded it simply "hangs".

A better way, I believe is to prioritise our goals and leave off the less pressing ones for tomorrow (this is not an advocacy for procrastination). Make a list of all the things you want to do, and start doing them in small, manageable steps. Adopt the very helpful habit of using a time-table which would enable you use your time more effectively. When you have achieved a desired expertise you can then go to the subsequent ones. You are actually not going anywhere if you think you can be the expert overnight. Knowledge is vast and is accumulated over a long time. Exercise patience and build a solid foundation for more complex and challenging undertakings in the future.

You Are In The Wrong Environment

Some environments do nothing but foster our present woes. By environment I would also like you to include the people that you hang around with. Look around you: Where and with whom I spend most of my time? How does this help or harm my goal? We talked of focus-less drifting the other time: If you are always at the club or some fun spot, your education would suffer. Some environments and associations are not really congenial for our progress. You might need to migrate to a more favourable environment; you might need to discard an old partnership and form a new one.

Breaking old partnerships and associations could be painful, but you have to really ask yourself what is the worth of that partnership. Ask yourself: Do these folks inspire me? Is this the most favourable climate to achieve my dreams? Would my goal be helped if I moved elsewhere? When trying to achieve your goal you really have to kill off any sentimental attachments you have for the promoters and sustainers of your predicament and face reality as it is.

You Are Reading the Wrong Manuals

If you have actually started but are not achieving anything, then go back and cross-examine the manual you are using to achieve your goal. It may well be a manual for something else or maybe it is plain crap. Go back and question the expert advice you received. Go back and re-examine your method.

I have seen many people painfully plodding a fixed routine without any improvement yet stubbornly refusing to adopt an alternative way. You need not be so conservative! If it is not working it simply is because you are using the wrong method? You can't get a computer on by repeatedly hitting the Escape button or by some other silly procedure because a computer wasn't meant to be started that way. So sadly you see that having an action plan is not all that there is to it, it also needs to be the right action plan. If you are already on a routine, therapy or medication and it is not working, then do be kind to yourself and find another way.