Your Key Constraints
Everyone should have a set of goals they are working toward, both long-term and short-term. In working toward those goals, you will experience times of motivation and sometimes constraint. What is your big goal? Is it to promote at work? To develop a successful business? To stay at home with the kids? Look at your goal and ask what is holding you back from achieving that. Why haven’t you met your goal already? What is holding you back? The first thing you need to do is to identify what it is that stops you or slows you down from meeting that goal. Once you know what that is, focus all of your energy on conquering that roadblock.
No matter what we do in life whether it is professional, spiritual, mental, or personal, there will always be limiting factors. Things that slow us down from being able to achieve our big goals. In your business life, it may be someone you work with, a resource you don’t have, or support that you need. In your fitness life, it my be self discipline, willingness to set time aside, and being okay with not receiving overnight results. In the book Eat That Frog, Tracy states that 80% of the things that hold you back are within your own circumstances, things you can control. Only 20% of limiting factors are external, but so often we like to think this is 20% us and 80% circumstances. Within ourselves it can be fear or just a false perception of one’s ability to overcome that bump in the road. I know that as a runner there is a lot of mind over matter required. I can psych myself in and out of a decent run. Often I think I am too tired, I don’t have time, or my body can’t go any further. The reality is, my body could probably do 10 times more than I think it can, I just don’t have the gumption to push through the barrier to prove to myself I can do it. Right now I look at a 10K and question if I really have the capability to do it. I have a hard time seeing past the 5K. I know once I break the 4 miles, 5 will seem so much more achievable, and once 5 miles, then 6 and so on.
So what is it that holds you back? Start your day off by tackling that first! What is your biggest career goal in life? Focus on that and look for the key constraint that is holding you back. What is it that is slowing you down, and face it head on!
Happy Friday!
