Goals: “Prepare To Take Detours In Stride”

Do an Internet search on successfully achieving goals, and you’ll come across plenty of wise insights about dealing with obstacles to achieving goals too. That’s because all the great goal achievers in history also had to deal with obstacles or mistakes they made along the way.

James Joyce said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

And he’s right.

Obstacles, mistakes and failures are shifting points for course changes along the journey. Sometimes you have to downshift and look for a new path to reach your goal. How you view or handle the obstacles to your goals has a significant bearing on how easily or quickly you reach your goal.

Still, I have to remind myself of these things on occasion, like when I was especially revved up about a particular goal recently. I kept hitting speed bumps, and my frustration levels kept revving up too.

The goal was conceived in January when my colleague, Tom Cassidy, was visiting Austin (my hometown) from England. We enthusiastically agreed to plan and deliver a series of public workshops together in Austin this coming April. Tom, who is an inspiring big thinker, said, “Let’s pick a venue that can fit 200 people for one of the events.” Swept up in his vision for a large program, I drafted a budget and started to list the likely locations that could host it.

The planning process was humming along pretty well, and then I hit a snag regarding venues. The typical places in Austin that could fit 200 participants kept replying with “that date is not available.” Turns out April is peak wedding season… duh!

After spinning my wheels in disappointment after disappointment for a couple of days, I finally decided to reset the goal to allow for a smaller event. It suddenly became a whole lot easier. I found a beautiful classroom-style venue that seats 90 at the AT&T Executive and Education Conference Center on the downtown Austin campus of the University of Texas. And we were able to reserve it for our prime choice date, April 21. Not only is the room well-suited to the seminar that Tom and I will be teaching, the location is centrally located and easy to reach. Additionally, participants can enjoy their lunch break in one of two eateries in the building or go to a variety of restaurants within walking distance. Success! And everything continues to fall into place smoothly and easily.

In one of our email correspondences, Tom reminded me of the “choose easy” rule of goal achieving: “A message I learned a while back is that ‘business is not meant to be a struggle – if it is, then you’re doing something wrong.’ Sure – it’s meant to be hard work, but not a struggle – it CAN be fun at every step of the journey.”

That’s true… and, after all, “easy” and “minimum willpower” goal achieving is what we are teaching in our 13×4 programs together.

As I’ve reflected on all of this, I see that our idea to plan a large program was not a mistake after all. In fact, it’s a really good idea… for the long term that is. Plus the original large program idea led to some major breakthroughs in two areas that I hadn’t known about before I hit those obstacles: 1) I realized that I needed to hire a freelance event promoter to assist me for this and future projects and 2) I realized that it’s better for me, at this time, to build toward the success of the big goal by achieving this smaller, interim goal first.

These aha moments all hit me last week, and then, over the weekend, I came across the following. From The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David Schwartz, in the chapter entitled “Use Goals to Help You Grow”:

…prepare to take detours in stride. If you are driving down a road and you come to a “road closed” situation, you wouldn’t camp there, nor would you go back home. The road closed simply means you can’t go where you want to go on this road. You’d simply find another road to take you where you want to go.

Okay, I get the message loud and clear. From now on, I’ll prepare to take detours in stride… and I’ll remember to choose “easy” too.

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Angela Loëb helps people rediscover and use their gifts so they bring who they are to what they do in life.  http://about.me/angelarloeb
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