Why you will fail
When you are setting a goal or an intention for the year, there is an important (but counterintuitive) question to ask yourself...
Why will you fail?
The way I usually ask this of my clients is: if we spoke in a year from now and you said "no" to the question of whether you achieved your goal, what are the most likely reasons you would give me as to WHY?
(I just want to pause here to point out is that this requires us to be able to know whether we succeeded or not. Many of us specifically choose something that's vague so that there is no clear definition of what "failure" would look like. However, I actually think that the possibility of failing at your goal is one of the most important aspects of setting one, because our relationship with failure is one of the most important relationships in our lives.)
Anyway, back to why you might fail.
Anticipating these obstacles and barriers are a little like saving for expenses like our car service or Christmas gifts. These expenses don't come up every month, and so we tend not to put money aside for them. But in reality, they aren't true unexpected expenses. You KNOW that you're going to need a car service in a few months and Christmas gifts at the end of the year and so it makes no sense to suddenly be surprised that our usual budget didn't cover these things.
This is the same kind of thing as anticipating obstacles on our path to achieving our goal.
Sometimes, we genuinely have big unexpected things happen that we couldn't foresee. But usually, we're thrown off course by everyday things that - if we'd taken the time to think about them - we would have totally been able to prepare for them.
These might be things like:
there will be days of low energy or mood and you won't want to go to gym like you planned to
your child will be sick on a day on a day you meant to meet up with someone as part of your goal to build more meaningful friendships
you'll be invited to a destination wedding when you had decided to save money to quit your job
your partner will ask you to watch a movie with him when you had committed to start going to bed earlier
a patient will want an appointment in your lunch break "just this once" when you made a commitment to rest in these breaks
If we accept that these things are going to happen, we can actually PLAN for them and decide ahead of time how we will respond - which of course makes it less likely that they will derail us.
Sometimes that plan looks like building in a buffer so that we can say yes to these things and still reach our goal.
Sometimes it looks like communicating your goals and plans to those around you, or asking for their support.
And sometimes it looks like learning to say 'no', manage urges and tolerate uncomfortable emotions.
Maybe you've been reinforcing a narrative that you "just don't follow through" when in reality you just need to anticipate and prepare for your real, human life instead of a magical one with no obstacles.
So I'd love to know from you. Why will YOU fail (hypothetically) at your goal?
