I strongly believe we learn by sharing stories, lessons, and experiences, therefore I decided to open my blog for stories by women from the communities I hang in, and launch the Go Live with Me interview series featuring entrepreneurs, and passionate people from all over the world.
In this community story, I invited Alisa Barcan, financial and abundance coach to share some of her insights into how we can improve our goal setting process to achieve more of our goals.
If you are reading this blog post it is likely that you either run your own business or would like to do so at some point.
If it’s the latter, having your own business is a goal you’ve set for yourself. As Tony Robbins said, “setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible”. Something cannot manifest in the physical reality before it has manifested in our minds first, via a thought.
However, what if that thought scares the heck out of you? What do you do if your goals are so outrageous that even saying them out loud gives you the chills? In this article I will share with you three strategies to deal with goals that scare you.
Before I jump straight into it, I’d like to mention that it’s OK for your goals to scare you. If they don’t, it’s likely that they are not big enough. How do you know if you’re striking the right level of ‘scariness’? Two of my favourite quotes about goals might help:
You get the idea: scared and excited at the same time!
The funny thing is that anxiety and excitement both manifest the same in our bodies: our heart rate increases, so does our cortisol level and we get hot flushes and flutters in our stomach.
It’s hard to sometimes distinguish between the two as they are both ‘arousal congruent’ (scientific term, yes). However, one big difference is that excitement is a positive emotion so when you’re so ‘aroused’ by your goal that you get paralysed, you know that it’s most likely fear and anxiety that you’re experiencing rather than excitement.
Here are three ways to tone down the fear and increase your chances of achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself:
1. BREAK down the goals into milestones.
The reason you are overwhelmed by your goals is that they seem too big to accomplish. The good news is that you don’t have to tackle it all at once. A milestone marks a significant achievement that takes you closer to your goal and you should break down your goals into several milestones that are manageable for you to work towards.
As financial goals are my specialty, I’ll give you an example of some milestones for the goal of making £10,000 within the next year:
· 5 new clients at £2,000 each
· 2 new masterminds at £5,000 each
· £2,500 in the next three months (from existing services)
Now that you have your milestones set, all you need to do is act DUMB.
2. Create a workflow.
Think about the things you need to do to reach these milestones and, more importantly, in which order to you need to do them. There is a logical flow to each process you will follow and being clear on priorities and chronological order will save you a lot of time. There is no point in advertising your book before you have written it for example. Yes, you will need to advertise it close to the launch date but not at the stage where it’s only an idea floating around in your mind.
3. focus on one milestone at a time.
The whole point of setting milestones is so that you can reach your goal one step at a time and not to get overwhelmed by how huge and unattainable it seems. You will perform a lot better if you only focus on one milestone at a time and. Multitasking is overrated anyway and studies have shown that it doesn’t even work. Whenever you feel anxious about your goal, think about this: you only need to reach the next milestone. As for the rest, you’ll cross that bridge when you get there.
Finally, I want to leave you with a bonus tip: take a leap of faith. Ask yourself what you have to lose if you try and what you have to lose if you don’t. Identify the cost of giving up, you might be surprised by how motivating loss aversion can be.
Goals can sometimes scare us and that’s OK. We’re supposed to feel a bit nervous about reaching our goals, but not to the point that this fear completely paralyses us. The three strategies above will help you turn that fear into productivity and tick those goals off of your achievements list. Now go and turn your goals into reality!
Alisa Barcan | The Savvy Corner
About the author
As a Financial Coach and Abundance Consultant, Alisa helps people rewrite their £inancial stories. Based in the UK, she works with young professionals and small business owners who wish to decipher their finances and improve their financial situation and relationship with money. Alisa is a prize winner Chartered Certified Accountant and a qualified Coach from The University of Cambridge, UK.
You can find her at The Savvy Corner.
Click to listen to Alisa’s interview on my Facebook show “GO Live w/ Me”.
Want more stories from entrepreneurs?
Sign up down the page to get more, and don’t forget to check out my Facebook page, where I run weekly Live interviews with entrepreneurs from all over the world.
