The Surest Way to Achieve Your Goals

Tis The Season For Goal Setting

It’s that time of year when we get flooded with adverts, images, and messages about how to make the coming year better than the last.

Most of us recognise that familiar New Year feeling, the Christmas break being like a celebratory closing of the year. For many there’s a renewed sense of hope and possibility though it may come with things like concern and anxiousness. 

Even though many of us know the calendar is a construct, we all like markers. We create meaning from them. We absorb collective momentum unconsciously, as we’re inundated with repeated messages reinforcing the dominant way of thinking we’ve grown up with. Take September for instance, for many it feels like the start of a new year because of our years at school. That same feeling can equally show up at the start of a day, a week, or a month.

This Year it WILL Be Different!

So, come January, resolutions form as do intentions and goals.

If you’re in business, you’ve almost certainly set your business goals, if not for the year, for the first 3 months. My own training calendar is set in October, because NLP training isn’t a last-minute purchase. Plus people like to plan – it creates a sense of order and certainty..

We often enter the New Year with a sense of anticipation and expectation. Our intentions are good. Yet, as soon as we face challenges or get busy, that enthusiasm can fade and motivation wanes. This will happen when our goals aren’t properly clarified and specific. In reality, though we might not recognise it, many of us hold doubts about our ability to achieve their goals anyway. Before we know it, we’re back with our old comfortable habits and life carries on much as it did before.

Again and again, we repeat these patterns, wondering why things never change.

Why is this the case?

There are a couple of common reasons. Firstly, the motivation to follow through was never fully established. The goal or intention (whichever word you use) didn’t engage the whole brain.

It seemed like a good idea, yet wasn’t compelling enough to redirect our focus and energy away from a familiar pattern into a new one. So, the nervous system (our neural networks) defaulted back to the path of least resistance – what it knows unconsciously. As you no doubt know, a primary function of the brain is to keep us safe and comfortable.

Anyone who’s trained with me, from Diploma through to Master Practitioner level, understands the creativity and precision of NLP goal setting, and that it produces real results.

Well Formed Goals

A well-formed goal is compelling in numerous ways. It engages all the senses, both hemispheres and the reticular activating system (RAS). It lights up the neural networks and creates DESIRE – an internal pull that generates energy, drive, and movement in the direction you want to go.

Yet alone this isn’t enough – here comes the second thing that holds us back – our beliefs. To achieve your goals, you need certainty. You need a felt sense that the goal is absolutely possible for you, and the ability to anticipate success.

How Uncertainty Derails Us

When we experience uncertainty about doing something, that means we have doubts about whether we can achieve it. Doubts reveal limiting beliefs, which, unless dealt with, will interfere in our progress towards our goals.

When we have doubts we may look outside for reasons to justify them – there’s not enough time, something out there is stopping us, or we don’t have the resources. Or we make statements about some aspect of our identity – we’re too old, young or not clever enough.

People are unaware that these are all limiting beliefs. They may say they’re just being realistic. They’re imagining all the possible challenges in advance and in doing so, they mentally rehearse them, which builds stress and anxiety. The focus is on worrying about what could go wrong, not on the desirable successful outcome. You can see why many then give up.

Handling Challenges

Challenges will arise – of that you can be certain – it’s the order of life. Accepting this is the first step for us and then we can move to reframe and welcome challenges as learning opportunities.

Think back to a significant problem you’ve overcome and how much you learned and how you changed as a result. Without challenges there’s less learning and little growth. Truth is we’d probably become bored and even apathetic. If you achieved every goal with little effort, it wouldn’t be so rewarding, would it?

An effective approach is to meet challenges when they arrive, rather than mind-reading every potential problem and planning for things to go wrong, not right. When difficulties do show up, ask questions that are likely to generate results, such as, ‘What next?’ ‘What can I do to resolve this’ rather than, ‘Why me?’

How Limiting Beliefs Show Up

Consider this, your career’s OK, so’s your relationship and you’ve a few niggles with your health, which you believe is normal for your age. Life ambles on pretty safely because it’s what you know. Yet deep inside, there’s a niggling feeling that this isn’t what you wanted for your life.

You’ve tried a few things to change your thinking; you’ve set goals and changed habits, which have all worked for a while. Then life gets busy, pressure increases and many of the old patterns sneak back.

It’s not because you lack discipline or willpower, you may well have plenty of both. It’s because you have underlying limiting beliefs about who you are in relation to sucessfully achieving your goals. So, no matter what you think consciously, your unconscious beliefs about your identity will always win out.

Which means you need to discover and remove the limiting beliefs.

Where to Start With Removing Limiting Beliefs

The best place to start is to get clear on your values, which are abstract concepts about what’s important to us. They hold our beliefs in place and drive our behaviour.

Begin by asking yourself, ‘What’s important to me about (insert area of life)? For example, What’s important to me about family? You might say trust, kindness, loyalty, support. Then keep asking the same question until you run out of values. Next identify your top five values and then put them in order of importance. Take your time and pay attention to how you feel as you do this. Trust your gut feeling.

Values Become Qualities

Now you have your values, translate them into qualities and apply them to yourself.

If kindness is a value, the quality is kind. How kind do you believe you are? If loyalty is a value, how loyal do you believe you are?

If you lack belief or have doubts about having these qualities, you’ve revealed a limiting belief. This will lead to incongruence in behaviours and actions, which in turn will hamper your success. This is where the shift needs to take place.

Removing Limiting Beliefs and NLP

In NLP, there are several processes that can rapidly turn unresourceful limiting beliefs into more empowering ones. You would learn these on the Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner training – you can read about that here.

A simple way to start changing your beliefs is to stop and think about all the times when the limiting belief wasn’t true. There will have been times, many more than you realise immediately, so take your time! The point is to gather as much evidence as you can to the opposite, which will loosen your grip on the belief. When you choose to focus on that evidence consistently, it will over time weaken the belief completely as you’ll start to behave differently too.

When beliefs are aligned with values, identity becomes congruent and desired behaviour follows naturally. And guess what happens? Goals stop requiring force and are achieved.