Why We Don’t Feel We Can Achieve Big Goals, and What the Real Barrier Is
An wonderful guest post by Beth Raps PhD
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Also, at the end of this post, you’ll find my audio commentary (for paid subscribers).
A short note from SLART: What an honour it is to have a guest post from Beth Raps. We first connected in 2013 and I have enjoyed following her work through her brilliant blog since.
Beth is super-smart, quick-witted, soulful, intuitive and beautifully playful with language. I love her work so much, I have read every single post on her blog and I had coaching sessions with her at the end of 2022 to help with organising time around my art practice.
The idea came to me, to share a guest post from Beth, it felt like a real co-creation as this post was born from a question that I posed to her, which you’ll see below in the post.
She has such a gentle way of inspiring you to do better, to live better, to feel better, to be better. I hope you get as much out of her words as I continually do.
Enjoy!
Why we don’t feel we can achieve big goals
In this post, I explain why we don’t feel we can achieve big goals and what the real barrier is. I’m inspired to write this explanation because of a wonderful request from a soul-colleague:
Can you talk around big goal setting and money please? I feel like there’s a big hustle culture these days and large goals which feel unobtainable. I get the law of attraction and it’s good to aim high, but it can also keep you stuck.
I asked for clarification about what it is specifically that “keeps you stuck” from this soul-colleague. They replied:
Why we don’t feel we can achieve big goals
What is the real barrier here?
How incremental goals build your self belief
Linking into that, how structure brings about the steps towards the bigger goal.
They also offered a story:
A bit of context, about 15 years ago I got inspired by this “regular guy”…who became a millionaire in a year using the law of attraction….I set the same goal, but I was sick with fear most of the time, had no plan then didn’t reach my goal. I had a lot of shame and self-hatred after that.
Let me take this wonderful, important question step by step.
So, why don’t we feel we can achieve big goals?
Short answer:
Because we are “small,” regular, normal people. This is how we see ourselves.
So we simply require re-seeing ourselves as normal people with big goals that are a normal part of being normal people.
Like: we are the gods we think are “other people.” We are those other people!
This answer is short so I can move onto the nitty-gritty detail that will help you see yourself this way.
How incremental goals build your self-belief
My soul-colleague understands me well–or already knows that “incremental goals build your self-belief.”
Like my soul-colleague, I too have a story of getting inspired by someone who had huge goals and getting sick (feeling bad in my body). And not making my goal because I trust my body, so I stopped pushing myself.
I took a back seat, and a step back.
And began seeking a path of integration. I have continued since that time last year experimenting toward reaching an income goal that feels very big to me, yet eminently doable, and won’t make me sick. My body keeps guiding me. No more sick. More big steps. So far, so good.
Trust your body
The path is incremental.
The pathway (for me) is incremental. This is what I recommend to the people who read and put into practice what I write, teach, and recommend.
It’s just so much easier and so much more doable.
Incremental goals are where it’s at for me.
There is nothing ‘specially glamorous about incremental goals. This may be why the are the path not chosen, the path least considered.
But they work.
An example
For example, I asked this soul-colleague (who is coaching with me 1:1) to chunk up their long-term income goal from the making and the promotion of their art into a near-term income goal. And I specifically gave them the homework of doing this homework three times:
I propose you do this in three stages:
Allow whatever answers come up immediately in the first stage.
Meditate and then reflect on the questions in the second stage, possibly coming up with a second answer to each.
Meditate and then allow yourself to integrate and come up with a final-for-now answer to each question in order to ground your answers a bit more but still have time to send them to me 24 hours in advance of our [first coaching] session.
And the answers, as you might expect, were similar–but more refined and more realistic each time.
I like this.
This is what I mean by “incremental”: realistic. Body-based. Embodied. Underpromising. Achievable. Unlimited–but easily achievable in the near-term. Unachievable now is unachievable in the future. Yuck. It has to feel good, and doable.
In order to achieve a big goal, it has to feel achievable now.
This is what changes our view of ourselves.
This is a big piece in what makes the huge goal suddenly much more achievable. Because we see ourselves achieving something important. This is all-important.
Once you see yourself achieving something important, you can keep right on doing it.
You may still feel queasy at times.
Let me with compassion avow that you may still feel sick even though you are setting–and achieving–incremental goals. You may still feel fear. I do.
The body takes time to catch up. Sick feelings come because they have developed to protect you and you haven’t had a chance to grow out of them yet. This will come. Get used to feeling queasy sometimes, is my recommendation. Not full-on sick. That’s not ok, pause and rest if that’s what’s happening. If it keeps up: chunk it up even more. Get more incremental.
But a bit queasy is ok.
Structure brings about the steps towards the bigger goal
So the final point is that you can structure your success. You can structure your achievement of the bigger goal. You just make it up! That’s how I do it. I invent a schedule of times, at particular days of the week, like a course I am creating for myself. (Which is what it is.)
And then I follow that course.
I do this because it makes me feel less queasy and sick. It reassures the parts of me who are hesitant that I know what I’m doing, I’m taking it slow, and I’m not just talking a good game about incremental–I’m acting on it.
Here are some resources for “chunking up” and structuring your progress toward the bigger goal you’ve set. Feel free to experiment, modify, and make it your own. Of course, keep progressing toward your bigger goal, and altering the course you’ve set yourself to reflect that. You’ve got this. If you’ve ever studied anything, you understand how to do this. (If you have questions, ask me! I love questions. They’re what inspired this blog post).
Resources
All my videos on Time and Structuring Your Life
All my posts on Time.
So honestly, this is what I know about why we don’t feel we can achieve big goals, and what the real barrier is. Please write me about how this goes for you. It will help me improve my advice, and my writing and videos. Thanks!
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Shared it! Thank you SO much, Steve!!!
Thank you for sharing