What do you do when you don’t hit your goals? Oftentimes we set really ambitious goals for ourselves, professionally, personally, for our future, but we don’t always accomplish them. For instance, you often see the gym a much busier place in January, but start to get filtered out in February and March.
People set goals all the time. Most people however don’t achieve them. And it’s for a few different reasons. But today I don’t want to talk about those reasons. I want to talk about what you can actually do, the strategy you can embrace and implement to make sure that when you don’t hit your goals, it doesn’t become a pattern. It doesn’t become a lifelong thing.
Don’t let failure discourage your mindset to achieve, dream and accomplish great things in your life
A couple of things I do is I regularly revisit my goals, my business goals as well as personal goals throughout the year, usually quarterly.
It’s important to not do this just once a year. This shouldn’t just be the end of the year practice where you’re reviewing the prior year. You should be able to resolve to live differently and better at any point in the year, but this should be done quarterly in my opinion. I personally subscribe and use a system called the 12 week year, but again, you can use whatever system works.
It should be one done periodically, ideally every three months. What this allows you to do is pivot when you fall off track to reassess where you are in your growth to understand and dissect the reasons why maybe you didn’t achieve the goals that you had set out to achieve and the time period that you had committed to.
I dream really, really big and oftentimes set ambitious timelines too. I don’t always achieve those, but I don’t let it discourage my resolve to affect my mindset negatively. A lot of people who allow it to affect them. It hurts their confidence level, their belief in their ability to achieve and get things done. As a result, they sometimes bring down their goals. They bring down their capacity to dream big. They check and reduce the size and scale of their next set of goals. It hurt their ego and notion that they’re able to achieve what they set out to. I’m here to encourage you to not let it do that!
We all sometimes don’t achieve what we set out to do. And I don’t view these as failures.
View your “failures” as teaching moments in your journey in life when working towards your goals
We have to be able to quickly pivot our mindset, and learn why we didn’t achieve that goal.
- Resource problem?
- People problem?
- Motivation and discipline problem?
- Did we not take the required actions?
- Do we not have a solid plan, tactics and strategies, to ensure that we achieve our goal?
We have to understand why and make sure we don’t repeat or duplicate that same pattern or behavior in the future, right? That’s the evolution, the growth of this personal achievement system that we all have some form of in us.
We’re all capable of doing some great things with our life, with our efforts and with our focus. But it’s important to understand what to do when we don’t achieve our goals. The other thing I want to encourage you to do is to be patient, you know, give yourself time.
I love that Tony Robbins quote that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years or 10 years or 20 years. I personally have been able to grow with my companies in the last six years. It blows my mind and it really inspires for what I can do in the next 10 years and over the course of my entire career. So give yourself space, time, be patient and allow this to unfold. You can dream really big, but realize that a year is a relatively short amount of time.
We can pack a lot in, but we have to stay focused on the prize and get singular in our vision and get firm in our resolution and then be disciplined in our action. These are the things I do if I don’t achieve my goals, I review what went wrong, and recalibrate my mindset. I focus on new goals and a new plan of action to get there. And I’m a patient and I give myself space and time and I’m easy on myself.
If you got any value from this, I’d love for you to leave a comment below or share this with somebody that would love to know what to do when they don’t achieve their goals. Check out all the free resources we have here on the blog and in our website. And if I can be of any assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you so much into your success and happiness. We’ll talk to you soon.