How do you set a goal for yourself? You face a problem that needs to be solved, you resolve to solve this problem and there you have it – you’ve just set yourself a goal, that of solving the problem at hand! The hard part begins here – how do you go about achieving your goals?

All kinds of obstacles can stand in the way of you attaining your goal but most of those are contingent to practical concerns. The most common hurdles reside in the mind, and these are the most difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, they must be overcome for the sake of your own personality development. Here are three common hurdles that stand in the way of you achieving your goals and how to overcome them.

1. Procrastination

Procrastination afflicts every person in the world but many people don’t understand why, which is alarming as it is one of the gravest difficulties that have to be overcome if they wish to achieve their goals. It turns out that procrastination is tied to our mind’s affinity to focus on the worst part of task or goal – when we embark on a new goal, our mind will inevitably turn its attention to the most difficult, most boring and most tiresome facets of the goal, and this dissuades us from beginning our journey towards attaining that goal.

The simple solution to procrastination is to not give your mind an opportunity to indulge in it – as soon as you set a goal for yourself, start working on it immediately, without any delay. Take a step forward – any step will do – as long as it keeps your mind from focusing on the nasty bits of your goal.

2. Daydreaming & fantasizing

Visualizing your goals is one thing, but incessant daydreaming and fantasizing about your goal is thoroughly detrimental to your progress. Fantasizing about your goals and abilities ingrains an inflated expectation of ourselves and makes us lose our focus, when all we should be doing is making actual progress and not just dream about it.

Research has shown that expecting too much out of ourselves and expecting great things to happen to us, significantly lowers our chances of attaining our goals as doing so simply makes us complacent. We put in less amount of effort when we think we’re going to win easily, and that causes us to lose.

3. Doing meaningless work

Meaningless work is still work, but not the most impactful kind – work like making unnecessary lists, repeatedly sorting files, going through the mail again and again – all this is work that doesn’t move you any further towards you goal. Yet we humans naturally gravitate towards such kind of work because it gives us an illusion of being busy and hence, productive.

We don’t need to tell you that being busy does not equal to being productive – work that actually accomplishes something, that gets you within reach of your goal is the only work that is productive. This ‘busy work’ is attractive to us as it doesn’t require us to dedicate a lot of mental resources towards them and we fool ourselves by imagining we’re ‘working’. Unless you aren’t willing to expend all your mental energy on meaningful work, you will be stuck doing ‘busy work’ and will remain far from your goal.

This self improvement is very achievable. Setting the goal is the easy part – staying on course and doing whatever you can to attain it is where the difficulty lies. By recognizing these mental hurdles, you will find the road to your goals a lot easier.

Article source: http://www.ivyclique.in/article/Self-Help-&-Self-Improvement/3-Mental-Hurdles-You-Must-Overcome-To-Achieve-Your-Goals/Mzg5Nw==/MTg1

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