Is your goal-setting system secretly sabotaging your success?

With most goals-setting strategies, you start out all strong, pumped up and motivated. Maybe you track your efforts with a fancy new planner, chart or app. 

But then… you know how it goes. Eventually, you falter and give up. Because most of these goal-setting systems inadvertently encourage you to lie to yourself. 

Ironically, they make this mistake because they’re actually trying to help you. 

The best of bad intentions

They’re hoping if they can keep your focus only on the good stuff and not the bad — somehow, you’ll magically make it to the finish line. 

But consider one of the goals most of us have in common: the fresh start of a New Year’s Resolution. What do we know about New Year’s Resolutions? No matter how earnest you are about your big goal in January, you’ll probably be laughing or crying about what went wrong by March. 

Whenever we try to make an important change, we often encounter some steep, internal resistance. It’s there because you likely chose something meaningful, but difficult, as your target. Something you’ve had trouble with before, have avoided starting again, or find confusing and overwhelming.

There might even be something subtly unpleasant about reaching your goals; a dreaded scenario with unwanted demands, attention or criticism. 

Fret and forget

And so… with all those vague fears in the way, you do what most animals do when faced with discomfort or even pain. You delay and distract. Fret. Freeze. After days or weeks of this, you seek relief by forgetting about your quest entirely. 

But somewhere between the strong, early lead and giving up at the end, that’s where the temptation to lie enters the picture. 

You bump up against intense internal resistance. And now, in your planner or app, instead of the satisfying scritch of a checkmark for that day’s achievement, or a nice unbroken chain of X’s, there’s just… nothing. A blank. Zero. An incriminating emptiness. 

It’s the pounds lost, words written, or dollars made in your new business, versus the times when you’re scared, stalling and making excuses. 

Since that goal-setting technique said nothing about anxiety and avoidance being a perfectly normal and expected part of the journey, you assume you have, once again, failed.

You weren’t good enough for the course, app or system. You didn’t try hard enough.

There’s nowhere to track your procrastination in your system, so it becomes a shameful secret. It happens over there, “exempt” from the program. 

You rationalize your skittishness as a momentary lapse. You’ll get back on the horse tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep. Hopefully, somehow, you’ll do better.

A reality-based approach

But... there is a totally different way to go about making a change in your life. Especially an important one like getting healthier, fixing your relationship, making more money, or finishing that creative project. 

Use a goal-setting system that doesn’t ask you to lie to yourself. 

The avoidance and angst is part of the process. 

It’s predictable and normal, so make sure you track it too, right next to your intermittent wins. When you log your misses, you’ll be doing something powerful and wonderfully counter-intuitive. You’ll create endless forward momentum with something you can’t buy from any expert, system or product. 

It’s the truth. Just plain, simple facts.

The truth helps you course correct and keep moving, not hiding in one place.

The amateur scientist

By tracking the truth — the wins and the misfires — your small, daily “failures” are no longer a source of pressure and shame anymore. They’re not confirmation that you’re doing it wrong. You don’t have to waste any more energy, shuffling them off-stage. 

You transform your stumbles and mistakes, your avoidance and fears into simple DATA. 

Data to be mined for clues about what you need as you learn to change in service of your goal. 

Data that is just information, neither good or bad, divorced from your self-worth. Data that reflects reality — not the delusion of dopamine-laced, before-and-after success stories. Data that fuels action, honest reflection and eventually, real results.

Getting from A to B, and eventually to Z, requires two things: 

• telling the truth about how it goes when you experiment with new behaviors

• finding trustworthy comrades who are also working toward an important goal.

So go create some honest, neutral data that can help you succeed, in the company of others on the same journey. 

Watch your confidence and excitement grow, and your sense of possibility expand.

Fail forward, together!