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Why Is It Difficult To Achieve Your Goals?

By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

Once you’ve planned how to achieve your goals, you are 50% closer to getting it done. This includes scheduling your tasks, evaluating your progress and figuring out common pitfalls that might occur. You need to plan how to reach your goals to make your business successful

With planning, you need to work diligently to make your dreams, desires, and goals come to fruition. You plan by ensuring you manage resources efficiently, manage risk and uncertainty, measure your progress and prepare for any mishaps. We often don’t get things done despite the best of our planning.

You might wonder why you aren’t getting things done for the success of your organization and team. This blog will tell you the seven reasons why you may not get things done and solutions to combat them.

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Top 7 Reasons Why You Don’t Get Things Done

There are several reasons why you don’t get things done to achieve your goals. You’ll know the reasons and the solutions for those reasons as you read ahead. So read carefully to understand if one of these is your barricade and get answers to march ahead and achieve your goals.

Overwhelming Feelings

If you have too many things to do and delegate in a short span, you are unable to give your undivided attention to a single task. So, you might get overwhelmed and flustered at the piles of tasks to do. This can cause your quality to deteriorate and leave you feeling even more overwhelmed.

Overcome The Challenge

Overwhelming feelings are not a nice feeling to undergo. So, you can do the following to overcome them:

Ensure you write down everything that you need to do. This will keep everything in front of you on a piece of paper instead of in a muddle inside your head. Writing down all the tasks will distance them, so you don’t worry.
After writing down and eliminating the worry, you can create bite-sized chunks and group your tasks. This helps you see what you need to achieve more clarity and lightens the load on the mind
Then you need to prioritize and do what you love and look forward to doing. Of course, do the urgent and important tasks.
Grab these and start doing things; you’ll also know what you need to delegate.

Essentially, take action and focus on the task at hand to reduce overwhelm

Being Over Ambitious

Several times, you might get pompous and start saying yes to everything. This means you try to get too much done in an unrealistic time frame. You won’t be giving your best at anything when you’re over-ambitious.

Overcome The Challenge

To avoid being over-ambitious and not achieving your goals, here are some tips:

Review your schedule before taking up more work. If you have too much to do already with several deadlines, you need to say no and delegate.
You need to consider both physical and emotional energy to complete the task
Consider your priorities carefully to choose what you’ll do, delay, delegate, or delete
If you are an ambition addict, you might want to learn to free yourself from anxiety and learn to relax.

Not Planning

Often, when you have to do certain tasks but don’t have the wherewithal to plan your actions, you won’t get things done. Plus, doing stuff without plans only prove to be a band-aid solution. Further, not having plans means you’re planning to fail.

Overcome The Challenge

So, if you’re unable to plan, here are some solutions:

You want to bear in mind that you plan to succeed when you plan. So plan each of your actions gloriously. You will see some positive results
A successful plan must have a criterion to measure your progress
If you have a plan, you will be able to track your progress, and it will ultimately help you reach your goal timely

Being In The Past

If whatever has stopped you from achieving in the past is still there in the present, you won’t get things done. You still have heavy baggage on you, and you don’t know how to deal with it. It might be a barricade on achieving presently due to your fears of failure, criticism and more. Plus, your anxiety and fear of the past might stop you from moving forward.

Overcome The Challenge

To avoid your past from making you fail in the present, you need to do the following:

Let go of the past. You need to commit to letting go of it and do it so that you don’t self-sabotage
Avoid feeling bad about the past and make a conscious decision to take responsibility for your happiness
You need to tell yourself that you’ll let go of the past and not relive it. You need to consciously think only about the present and keep moving forward

Not Knowing Where To Start

Often you fail to get things done because you don’t know where to start. When you don’t know where to start, you keep procrastinating.

Overcome The Challenge

So, if you’re unable to start doing things, follow these tips:

Stop procrastination and start taking actions to resolve your doubts
Focus on taking small steps towards achieving your goals
Instead of merely thinking of the task, start taking steps to do it
If your task has no structure, get it down on paper then you will have it easier to formulate plans

Not Having A Big Enough Reason

When you don’t have your why for the task, you won’t get it done. You need a big enough reason and true motivation to get your task done. Otherwise, you won’t feel a connection or the need to accomplish it.

Overcome The Challenge

To understand the purpose and get the motivation to do something, you can do the following:

Share the project with someone who can keep you accountable
Understand why you need to do the project and how it plays a role in achieving the big picture
Visualize what achieving the goal will feel like

Nobody Cares

If you have no one to hold you accountable and ensure you meet the deadline, you’ll automatically lose interest. You start feeling like no one cares.

Overcome The Challenge

So to overcome this, you need to ensure the following:

Have someone to hold you accountable
Ask help
Engage an accountability partner or coach.

Endnotes

Even with the most meticulous planning and organizing, you might not get things done and achieve your goals. This is due to reasons like being overwhelmed, being over-ambitious, not planning, living in the past, not knowing where to start, and several more reasons.

However, there’s a solution for each reason. You need to find a big enough reason and purpose to help you achieve your goals. Often some accountability coaches like TickThoseBoxes will mentor you and help you plan your actions to push you to get things done. So share your goals with them and get things done.

About The Author

Darren Finkelstein, known widely as The Accountability Guy®, is a beacon of transformation and inspiration in the realms of accountability, leadership, and personal development. Darren’s story is about resilience, reinvention, and how he’s channelled accountability into his superpower.

With an illustrious career that spans across continents and industries, Darren stands as a formidable international accountability coach, advisor, mentor, and captivating author/speaker whose narratives and methodologies have empowered high-performing individuals and teams from Australia/New Zealand to the far reaches of Latin America, Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States through his coaching programs.

The foundation of Darren’s methodology and teachings is based around his bestselling book, “The Accountability Advantage – Play your best game,” and his new book currently in production, scheduled for a late 2024 release, “NO – Building a Life of Choice without obligation.”

The heart of Darren’s international focus is to Get Clarity and know what to do first. Get Started, know what to do next, and Get Sh*t Done knowing what to do more of. Darren works with high-performing individuals and teams to help them realise their wildest dreams and smash their goals like glass pinatas by harnessing their superpower of accountability!

Before etching his name in the annals of coaching and mentorship, Darren was an integral part of the Apple legacy during the transformative Steve Jobs era. As the Manager of Commercial Markets for Apple Australia.

Read Darren’s full Bio here: https://tickthoseboxes.com.au/about/

PS - Whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you become more accountable...

1. Take the Accountability Scorecard

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2. Read my book "The Accountability Advantage - Play Your Best Game"

Eliminate procrastination and overwhelm and start playing your best game.
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3. Book a complimentary Accountability Assessment

Invest 15 minutes now and avoid months or years of struggle. If you genuinely need help becoming more accountable, it can’t hurt to find out. Book here.

Why Is It Difficult To Achieve Your Goals?