Why You’re Not Hitting Your Goals, and What to Do About It
I hope you had an amazing Fourth of July weekend – it certainly was very restful in my neck of the woods. This weekend also brought up a question that so many of my clients have asked me over the years, which is, “Monica, what do I do when I’m not hitting my goals, or I want more?”
Typically, people’s first response to not getting what they want is to try harder to do more, to wake up earlier, to work later, to network more – to push themselves a little bit harder.
Now, in some cases, that might be a great tactic, especially if you’ve got space in your calendar to take it on, or maybe you haven’t been as active as you could’ve been. But if you’re like most women, there are four main reasons why you might not be hitting the productivity levels or results that you’d like to achieve.
Number one: you’re tired. You’re got too much on your plate. You just don’t have the energy and space to be creative, to be inspired, to do the work that you want to do, or to get the results that you want.
Number two: you’re sick. So many of us women have been dealing with hormone issues, persistent body aches, energy problems, or long COVID, and have found ourselves unable to work at full capacity.
Number three: you’re stuck in fear. You sit down to do your work, and your mind is immediately flooded with any number of worries: What if people reject me? What if this doesn’t work out? What will it be like if I’m visible?
Number four: you’re confused about what to do. You start shooting a video, but then you realize you don’t know what the topic should be. You sit down to plan your next group program, but you don’t know how to write the outline, or even if you’ve got the content.
And the thing is – these four reasons will persist no matter what you do. No matter how much harder you push, no matter how much later you work, you’re still going to be tired or sick or stuck in fear or confused.
I’ve realized that the real solution is to get help.
All of these situations most likely call for some type of outside support. If you’re tired, you may need someone to support you in areas outside of your business, or to help you determine how to give yourself more time and space.
If you’re sick, you’re probably going to need help finding the root of your problem and starting to heal. If you’re stuck in fear, you’re going to need help understanding the origins of your fear and begin to let it go. And if you’re confused about what to do, you’ll need some support in making a clear action plan.
But in a lot of cases, we are so stuck in our fears, our fatigue, our worries, our confusion, that we don’t even know where to start looking for support. In some cases, we don’t even trust outside help.
So what is a busy entrepreneurial woman to do?
Listen to yourself, and trust your own inner voice.
Oftentimes, our higher selves, our inner voices, our intuition, are speaking to us. They’re telling us what we really need to do. They’re telling us who to turn to, who to hire, what emails to open, what programs to buy, in order to make changes in our lives.
But we don’t hear those voices – or we don’t trust them.
In any situation in which you’re not hitting your goals, the first thing you want to do is to get quiet with yourself. Give yourself a chance to stop, turn inward, and check in with your intuition. Listen to what that inner voice might be telling you.
Here are three suggestions on exactly how to get quiet with yourself.
In the morning, block out an hour to sit, drink a glass of tea, meditate, visualize – to just be.
When you’re done with work for the day, take some space to sit outside. Enjoy the grass, enjoy the trees, journal, and most importantly, allow for quiet – enough that you can hear those voices in your head.
During the day, take a few minutes to walk around the block, or even just step outside and put your feet in the grass, so that the voices in your head can come through.
See, we get so busy that every waking moment of our day is literally filled with noise: the noise of taking care of other people, checking Instagram, moving from one task to another.
Our inner voices can’t break through all the noise. And after months of our intuition being unable to reach us and guide us, we are left feeling alone, confused, overwhelmed, and most importantly, unable to create the success that we want in our businesses and in our lives.
I know it seems like a minor change, but I think that creating quiet space – even just a little bit – is one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves.
My challenge for you this week is to create quiet space for yourself every single day, even if you start out with just 15 minutes of it. Listen. Notice. See what happens.
