(One Reason) Why We Don’t Achieve Our Goals
We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. – Robert Brault
This quote came into my Inbox from one of my mentors (Steve Chandler).
It offers a powerful nuance to viewing goals: the idea that, often, what keeps us from our larger, lofty – amazing – goals are the smaller goals we settle for.
There are so many reasons for why we settle; a few examples:
- we’re afraid we’re not good enough
- we’re afraid we can’t really do “it”
- we don’t know if we’ll like ourselves when we get there
- we don’t know enough about how we’ll get there
- we’re not sure what things will be like when we achieve our “big” goal
The theme that runs through all the why-we-donts is fear. A fear that comes from not knowing about what we/things will be like when we finish.
This fear is normal.
Even if we don’t call it “fear,” if we’re not starting we’re afraid of something.
Anything that we love more than we fear, we do/make-real.
This fear generally comes not from a weakness or deficiency within us, but our deep-seated and highly-developed survival instinct.
An instinct which strongly prefers the status quo and that which hasn’t killed ‘us.’ (In a post-saber-tooth-tiger era quite a low bar indeed . . . ).
The antidote is to clearly decide what we want and take small, daily steps toward it.
Quieting our mind through meditation and fueling our body with healthy foods and plenty of water helps too.