Have you ever set a goal? Me too. Have you ever missed a goal? Me too. Are there goals you have set and reset, and are still yet to achieve? Me too. We all know the importance of goal setting, I hope. Without a focus point and a time frame, nothing great can or will be accomplished in this lifetime. So, knowing this, why do we fail to achieve many or most of the goals we set? I think I may have inadvertently stumbled across the answer over the last few weeks.
I believe the greatest enemy of most of the goals we set is the lack of immediate consequences. There are definitely long-term consequences for missing most goals. Missing a health and fitness goal may not significantly impact in the short-term, but could be catastrophic down the track. Missing a financial goal may not immediately change too much in our lives, but may lead to financial ruin over the long-term. So, because many goals do not confront us with an immediate do-or-die kind of outcome, it can be easy to put off what we need to do to achieve the goal. Therefore, the answer to goal achievement is simple, and I will explain what I mean by this powerful and exciting achievement that has just happened for me.
Just over a week ago I bought a home. Less than three weeks before that, it was not even a thought in my mind. So, how did I go from not even thinking about buying a home, to decide, shopping for, finding, and buying one in under three weeks? Great question. The answer is simple and is the key to all goal achievement. There was no other option.
I moved to a rental property at the end of last year (2021) to be closer to my dad and return to the hood I grew up in. It has been great to be back. As of August 2021, I had been in the place for 9 months and so the thought of moving again was a long way off my radar. Until choice was taken from me, that is. I received a notice to vacate from the agents, with no explanation why, and was directed that I had to be out by November 25, 90 days later. The thought of renting again was intolerable to me, so in that moment, I knew this was a sign and it was time to buy. I now had a very clear and very urgent goal with a non-negotiable deadline.
My goal was to find, buy, settle, and move into a home by mid-November to give me time to get out of and clean my rental. I had no other option but to do this. There were no allowances, but serious consequences for missing this deadline. You should have seen me go. I was, and still am, a man on a mission. Over the next two weeks, I attended conservatively forty open for inspections, believing in my heart I would know the place when I saw it. I just had to see lots. I certainly saw lots of what I didn’t want, and then on a Saturday which I attended eleven opens, just two weeks after receiving the notice to vacate, I found it. I viewed it again on the Monday, put in an offer that day and it was accepted on the Tuesday, less than three weeks after this whirlwind began. I will be in my new place and out of my rental one month earlier than my November cut-off.
The point is this, it was not the goal that drove me to make this happen. It was the fact that I had no option but to make it happen, or I would be homeless. Therefore, this exciting event has taught me a massively important lesson about the key to goal achievement. Remove the options and it will be done. So, the question you need to ask as you set your next goal is, how do I make it non-negotiable and remove all other options, before those options are removed from me?
You see, people who continually set and miss wellbeing, financial, relationship, business, or other goals, will one day be faced with a do-or-die situation. The most important question, again, is how do you create that do-or-die situation before that point? How do you make it intolerable to miss the goal you set? When you come to the decision in your mind that there are no other options other than achieve the task by the set date, then the job is done. All that’s left is the work. That moment I looked at that notice to vacate and knew I had no other option; the job was done. Then the exciting work had to happen and trust me, it was an exciting adventure, and still is. When you decide to make something great happen in your life, the work is fun and meaningful, and the result is predictable.
Annalise Jennings, my guest on this week’s podcast called Drop the rock, is an inspiring example of this. Two years before she even knew why, she was moved to register a company called Dynamic Exchange. Then, seemingly by accident, an opportunity was presented to her to help her understand why and go on to impact many lives, in a dynamic exchange. She did something that didn’t make a lot of sense, but for her, she had no choice but to do it.
Success, achievement, joy, and abundance in life is available to you, and it is not as hard as many people think it is. Visualising and figuring out what you want is not hard. Setting a goal to make it happen is not hard. Even the daily actions you need to take to achieve it are not hard. The hard work, and the key to goal achievement, is removing all options and making it non-negotiable before those options are removed for you. Make the decision to achieve great things today, and then enjoy the exciting adventure that awaits.