How do you know what to watch out for to avoid the pitfalls of missing expectations? It’s probably happened to you before. You thought you had the perfect plan for achieving your goals. You had no doubt that this time you’d succeed. And then, days, weeks or months later, you realised that somehow you’d gotten off track and never met your objective.
“How do you know what to watch out for to avoid the pitfalls of missing expectations?”
- Don’t write the goal down.
- Create goals that are not well-defined or lack specificity. ‘Save Money This Year’ is not the same as ‘Save£1,000 by July 31’.
- No true personal meaning behind the goal. No driver for doing it.
- Fail to define a reward for achieving the goal as well as a reward for achieving the intermediary milestones required to get there.
- Don’t share the goal with another person for accountability, help and support.
- Keep changing or switching goals as their focus or interest changes.
- Never incorporate the goal into a realistic plan that includes measurements, timelines and resources.
- Do not understand and plan for how pursuing the goal might affect their balance across the other Cornerstones of life.
- Never set a date to actually start working toward the goal.
- Because of the lack of accountability, they allow themselves to make excuses for not meeting the goal.
- Reach an intermediary milestone, get comfortable, and never follow through to the end.
- Don’t acknowledge the challenges of achieving the goal and when it gets hard they give up.
- Do not think about the goal and the process of achieving the goal often enough.