Letting go or changing a goal can often feel like giving up and I believe this is why a lot of people avoid this crucial part of the goal setting process. Knowing when the pursuit of a goal no longer serves you or is no longer having a positive impact on your life is a great tool for helping you find something you really are passionate about and something you are happy to make sacrifices for.
Taking the pride or ego out of the decision and just judging yourself based off your actions is a great place to start. When we first set a goal, we generally set a timeline and a list of weekly or daily tasks required to hit that goal now actions speak louder than words so if you're finding that your actions don’t reflect how you feel about the goal and are consistently missing the daily or weekly tasks associated to achieving the goal it might be time to sit down a reset the goal. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, often we set goals without a complete understanding of the process involved so when we get into actually completing the tasks it’s common to find it a lot harder than we thought it would be or different to how we imagined which is reflected in missed tasks and an incomplete action plan this is a key time when you should sit down a revaluate if this goal is still important to you or realistic.
Many avoid this process seeing it as a failure avoiding the most important part of the process, being aware of what you won’t do or sacrifices you're not willing to make a lot of the times we hyper focus on our success and avoid reviewing our setbacks in this case there is a far more valuable lessons in the setback of not sticking to the process that we aren’t learning from.
So, if you find that your words aren’t matching up with your actions or you’re consistently not completing your action plan towards your goal it’s most likely time to revisit your goal and potentially reset your goal. The only thing that can get in the way of it is your own ego or inability to be vulnerable with yourself. Think about it this way, if this set back is what stands between you and achieving your goal, isn’t it worth it? All it takes is stopping and understanding why there is a gap between your intentions and your actions then adapting your plan to better suit, again it doesn’t have to be perfect because chances are you will need to repeat this process more than once.
The term I like to use is fail forward stop seeing failure or resetting goals and backward steps and start seeing them as a step closer to a better understanding of your goal and ultimately achieving it.
