Why does goal-setting often paralyze smart people from taking action?
It’s one of the cruel paradoxes of time management: The act of setting “big picture” goals that are clear and specific should help you focus on what matters most, but in reality it often leaves people paralyzed when it comes to taking massive action towards their goals. In fact, the clearer some people get on their values and priorities, the more paralyzed they can become. So why does this happen?
The reason is simple but not necessarily obvious. When people go through one of these “big picture” exercises, they have the notion that the process will make their lives simpler and easier to manage. That’s true enough – but only in the long run. In the short term – the here and now – the process of moving from where they are to where they want to be will actually make things even more complicated than they are now.
That’s a problem for most people, who don’t have the luxury of being able to drop everything that they are doing in life and start over doing only “the right things.” The reality of it is that they are going to have to make incremental shifts towards the life they are trying to create. And that’s generally going to be a complicated and time-consuming process.
On top of that, this complicated and time-consuming process has to be balanced with a schedule that’s already overly complex and has no “free time” to spare. So no matter how much you know your “new” goals reflect the reality you want to create for yourself, you’ll still have all the day to day urgencies always fighting for your attention.
And that’s where paralysis sets in. If you’re working on new goals, you’re stressing out about all of your urgent unfinished responsibilities. And if you’re working on your day-to-day commitments, you’re feeling tension because you’re not making headway on your long-term goals. And your productivity plummets. (If this hasn’t happened to you, you likely know someone who is struggling with this right now. Send this post to them.)
What makes it even worse is an underlying problem … if you don’t have a great system for managing your work, your time and yourself, you won’ be ready to effectively handle your new goals when you start working on them.
Fortunately, there’s a solution, though it’s not a very good one. To make consistent, powerful headway on your long-term goals, you have to devote yourself to becoming an outstanding manager of your time, effort and focus exactly where you are now. Fixing the process of how you work has to be a top priority. You have to become committed to making the adjustments in your habits and behaviors that will create more leverage in your life.
That personal leverage is the way that you’ll reduce your stress levels while actually accomplishing more results in less time. And that new freed-up time is where you’ll be able to make powerful headway on your new goals. But it requires some consistent practicing of the fundamentals of managing your time and your actions. there’s no way around it. You can’t just buy a neat planner or grab a book and hope it solves your problems for you.
Instead, what you do is decide that you’re going to set aside regular, consistent time to improve the way you work so that you get more done each and every day and implement a “paralysis-free” work strategy to start getting traction on your new goals while still maintaining control over all of your old commitments.
Quick, Do This Now
So let’s get started right now by implementing a five-step “Paralysis-Free Strategy for Managing your Goals”:
1) Get a handle on all your current obligations.
If you want to stop feeling tension and guilt about working on your new goals, you need to have a solid grip on all the current commitments you are responsible for. If you don’t have this written out and recorded somewhere, you’re never going to be able to manage it.
2) Get a handle on all your goals.
If you don’t have your goals written out, you can’t manage them either. Every goal you have is really a project, or a collection of projects, that give you an end result. Until you record them in a way that can be managed, they’ll just be floating around (and chances are, staying undone).
3) Begin optimizing your obligations.
You’re a busy person with a large number of personal commitments that currently use up a great deal of time. Your weekly meetings with yourself (or a time management coach) need to focus on getting these commitments taken care of in a more efficient way (and in some cases, stepping away from some of them entirely). Since you have them all tracked in step 1, you can identify what needs to be worked on first.
4) Optimize your goals.
Just because you can’t tackle all your goals now doesn’t mean you can’t make headway every day. Begin to break down your goals into things you can start doing now in the free time you’re creating in step 3. You’ll feel a lot better about where things are going as you do this, because you’ll be making real progress (that will only get faster as you do more of the step 3 work).
5) Keep yourself working steps 1-4.
People generally don’t reach their goals because hey stop putting in the effort consistently. Don’t be one of those people. Commit to keeping current and effective on all four of the above steps, no matter what it takes.
With this strategy you’ll be able to effectively schedule your commitments (which will make you feel a lot less stressed) and maximize your opportunity to slip in work on your new goals (which will make you feel gooooood). And you won’t feel paralyzed by the guilty feeling that you should be working on “something else.”
REFERENCE:
http://www.rockyourday.com/how-to-set-goals-that-dont-paralyze-you/
nice story