Alan W. Goff
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The Goal Setting Gap
(Part 2)
‘Continued from part 1
Once you make the decision to go after a BIG goal, swallow hard and step outside your comfort zone to do the things you need to do to grow and achieve a big goal, you so often get a proverbial punch in the nose from life. It’s at that time and place that you meet with resistance, failure or challenges and if the goal you set is not big enough… if the "pay-off" on the other side is not big enough, you will go right back to your comfort zone. It is Abraham Maslow that said, "We will either step forward into growth or we will go back into safety."
The second mistake people make when they set goals is very similar to the first. Again, the thinking is reversed. We allow our current results to control the way we think and rather than basing a goal on what we want, we set a goal on what we think we are capable of achieving… on what we know we can do.
This is where we begin to create all these elaborate plans for success that actually hinder our success. For example, you may say, "Right now our company is making a million dollars a year in gross sales and if we can take our current customers and increase the numbers by 10%, we can grow this much", and "If gas prices go down, and there is peace in the Middle East, then "that" will happen." Or, if the housing bubble doesn’t burst or the stock market doesn’t crash, well then maybe we can do "this". The whole elaborate plan is based on what we think is a justified or proven situation.
The problem with that is.... as I said earlier, goal achieving happens by law. The first law of creation is order and movement. Nothing in our universe stays the same, so by the time you finish creating this elaborate plan or scheme in order to get what it is you "think you are capable of doing"; the circumstances of which you have based that plan on have changed. The stock market may go up or down. Gas prices may go up or down. There may or may not be peace in the Middle East.
The thing is we don’t really know, so when we step outside the comfort zone and begin our action plan and we meet with circumstances and conditions we had not prepared for....Uh Oh... what happens if that pay- off on the other side is not big enough, if we had not planned for this, that or the other thing… chances are we will either become very confused and quit or drag our sorry butt back to the drawing board hoping to luck out and get the big break next time.
I love the way Voltaire said that we invented the words: ‘luck’, ‘chance’, and ‘miracle’. They express the known effects of unknown causes. One has to understand or at least be aware that everything happens by very, very precise laws. As we come to understand these laws and then attempt and I say attempt because there isn’t anyone who does it perfectly, when we attempt to incorporate them into our lives, things start to happen.
‘Continued in part 3
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