What To Do When You Aren't Sticking To Your Goals
In January, lots of us set these big, audacious goals. And that is GREAT! But now it’s March.
Which brings us to the real reason why you’re here: you want to know why the heck you’re not sticking to your goals. And probably more than that, you want to know how you can change that, am I right? Cool - you’re in the right place then!
Let’s break this down and start with WHY you’re not sticking to your goals.
Now obviously I don’t know your specific goals and I don’t know the surface level reasons why you’re not following through. But in my experience with going after my own dreams and in working with my one on one clients as a productivity coach, I’ve picked up on patterns and been able to figure out some underlying, deeper reasons why you may not be sticking to your goals.
Reason #1: You’re leaning on motivation instead of choosing discipline.
Let’s talk about the difference between motivation and discipline.
Dictionary.com tells us:
MOTIVATION: the general desire or willingness of someone to do something
DISCIPLINE: train oneself to do something in a controlled and habitual way
Motivation comes and it goes. You have to have the desire to do something to follow through. Whereas with discipline, you are trained to do it like a habit. Discipline doesn’t ebb and flow like motivation can.
So instead of asking yourself why you’re not motivated to do something, I want you to instead start asking yourself, “How can I be disciplined in accomplishing this? What behaviors can I make into habits that allow me to step toward the goal consistently even when I don’t feel like it?”
If you don’t know the answers to those questions - I’ve got you, girl! Keep reading and things will start to (hopefully) make more sense.
Leaning on motivation is when you skip going to the gym after work and head to your bestie’s house to catch this week’s episode of The Bachelor and guzzle down a few glasses of wine even though you told yourself that you wanted to feel healthier and take better care of your body.
Choosing discipline looks like waking up 30 minutes earlier on Monday morning so you can get in a sweat session before work. It’s choosing to fuel your body with a healthy breakfast and to pack a nutritious lunch the night before so you’re prepared the next day. It’s having a satisfying and healthy dinner before you head over to your BFFs to watch The Bachelor and enjoy A glass of wine.
You can’t skip your workouts and consider wine/pizza/ice cream a nutritious meal the majority of the time AND feel healthier. It doesn’t work that way. BUT you don’t have to skip spending time with your best gals to feel healthier either. You just have to be disciplined in getting your workout in before heading over there.
If your goal is truly important to you then you’ve got to cozy up with discipline, babe. And if you find yourself truly struggling to form habits and choose discipline then you may be struggling with number 2.
Reason #2: You don’t have clarity.
I feel like I talk about the value of being clear on your goals SO DANG MUCH but that’s because I’ve been on both sides of the table - like right now, I know EXACTLY what I’m working toward so it makes showing up when I don’t necessarily feel like it more doable.
I’m able to choose discipline even when the motivation isn’t there because I’m so clear on the goal I’m working toward.
But I’ve also been in the camp where my dreams were a little murky. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was working toward so showing up to do the daily work was mentally defeating. That was the place I was in back in December. My vision was scattered and I wasn’t quite sure where I was heading with Hustle Sanely. Over 2019, Hustle Sanely had grown and evolved in ways that I didn’t anticipate and I began to pile on new things that were ultimately straying me away from my goals of having a podcast, releasing a paper planner line, teaching online courses, and writing books.
The other things were GOOD things but they weren’t GOAL things.
For example, I recently shut down my merch shop because that part of my business didn’t align with my big goals. I was spread so thin and had lost sight of my vision.
Maybe when you started working toward your goal you knew exactly what it was that you were working toward. But as time passed and you started moving in the direction of your goal, something might have changed.
Maybe on the way to the original goal you discovered something else. Or maybe you accomplished what you were trying to accomplish only to realize that it wasn’t as much of your jam as you thought. That’s totally okay! But you’ve got to be real with yourself and be willing to ask yourself tough questions and be willing to release your grip on a goal that might not be true to your heart anymore.
Reason #3: Your priorities are out of whack.
Are you spending most of your time and energy on tasks that aren’t moving the needle? I want you to ask yourself: “Is how I’m spending my time every day moving me closer to my goals or not? Are the tasks that I’m doing tasks that help me get where I want to go?”
Procrastination is sneaky. It can mask itself as productivity. Lemme give you an example:
I work from home so cleaning the house during my designated work hours is a big form of procrastination for me.
Does cleaning my house need to be done? YEP.
Does having a clean house make me happy? ALSO YEP.
But does cleaning the house during work hours get me closer to releasing a paper planner or recording a new podcast episode? NOPE.
So cleaning my house during work hours is a GOOD THING but it isn’t a GOAL THING. Cleaning my house during my work hours is a form of procrastination. Working during my work hours has to be the priority during work hours. Not cleaning the house.
I use 2 strategies to help me create habits that I can be disciplined in when it comes to keeping my priorities each day straight: time blocking and Focus 3.
Time blocking is a well known time management tool where you divide your day into blocks of time. Each block is assigned a specific task (or group of tasks). During that time block, you only work on the task that you’ve assigned to it.
I teach about the time blocking method in my 6-week Hustle Sanely Intensive course. Time blocking my day out each morning keeps me from having to decide what to focus on when throughout the day. Instead of thinking about what I need to do, I can just do it. I’m way less likely to stray from my tasks when I know exactly what I need to be doing.
And the next strategy that helps me stay disciplined is FOCUS 3! Choosing a Focus 3 every day is part of the Hustle Sanely 5 - which you can learn all about here! Your Focus 3 is a list of 3 non-negotiable tasks for each day. Implementing the Focus 3 strategy keeps me from overloading my plate every day. Combining time blocking and the Focus 3 strategies allows me to structure my days in a way that is disciplined and not depending solely on my motivation levels.
Reason #4: You’re not being patient.
I feel like this one is pretty straightforward but it needs to be said. In a social media-driven world, it seems like instant gratification is happening all around us all the time. We see people sharing their milestones and accomplishments but it can be tough to find people sharing their journey there. The journey can be LONG, people. And you might just be throwing in the towel too early which is why you’re not sticking to your goals. You feel as though you’re not seeing results fast enough so the easy thing to do is walk away.
Think about this for a second:
We don’t go to the gym once and walk out shredded.
We don’t write one sentence and then have a published book.
We don’t go to kindergarten and then get our diploma.
Everything (well almost everything) happens over time and because of what you do as the time passes. You showing up and putting in the work every day is not time wasted. While the choice you make to show up today might not get you to your goal tomorrow, it is still propelling you in the direction of the goal. If you do that day after day, week after week, month after month - you WILL eventually hit that goal of yours. If you want to stick to your goals then girl, you’ve got to stop quitting too soon.
An action step that you can take when you’re feeling impatient is writing down your goals every day. I’ve talked about this approximately 1,000 times but I’m going to keep talking about it so buckle up, lol. There is actually scientific evidence to writing out your goals every day.
This is from an article from Forbes:
”Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success, and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don’t. So why does writing your goals help? It’s an important thing to know; after all, it might seem like a lot of extra work to write something down when you can just as easily store it in your brain, right?
Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding. External storage is easy to explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. You could post that paper in your office, on your refrigerator, etc. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue (aka reminder) every single day.
But there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encoding. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.
Neuropsychologists have identified the “generation effect” which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve merely read.”
Y’all know that I write my goals every single morning (in the present tense, of course) in my Hustle Sanely Journal.
I don’t care what you write your goals down on - a napkin, the back of a pizza box, on your kid’s class newsletter - just make sure you’re writing them down every day. It keeps you connected to them. It keeps them in front of your face. It helps you stay the course.
Alright that’s it - 4 reasons why you’re not sticking to your goals and what you can do about it. I hope you learned something that you can carry with you as you choose discipline over motivation. You are 100% capable of sticking to your goals, girl. 100%!
If you enjoyed this blog post, you can listen in on the conversation on episode 021 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast!
