By Books Author Denise Turney

Desire for success and goal setting are like twins. When the former is paired with vision and powerful emotion, it can serve as an effective motivator. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the path will always feel easy. In fact, if you focus solely on what you want without developing and sticking to a goal setting plan, you might not ever realize your dreams.

Success Roadblocks – About Distractions

There are many reasons why this might happen. To begin, you could encounter distractions. I was thinking about this earlier today while I was walking outdoors. Less than 10 minutes into the relaxing walk, a northern mockingbird started making scratchy chat calls. Since I’d heard these aggressive, territorial birds screeching and making warning calls before, I didn’t think that the chat calls were meant for me.

So, I kept walking. Next thing I knew, the mockingbird swooped toward me. Then, it gave another round of chat calls and started to aim toward me again. This time, I turned with a bag I’d been carrying and prepared to fight back. As I watched the mockingbird glance toward a tree, I knew that it was protecting its young. It didn’t matter than I’d been walking more than 10 yards away from the tree. The bird had perceived me as a threat.

The First 90 Days

Between working to calm the bird and stay out of its path, it dawned on me that I also had to steer clear of oncoming traffic. That’s when I realized how easy it is to get distracted. One small experience, one seemingly tiny event, and you could be focused on something that has absolutely nothing to do with what you really want. It happens quickly. Even more, it happens so easily that it appears to occur absent thought. [When’s the last time you were distracted? What was going on?]

And that’s just one real life example of how easy it is to get distracted. Decide to pursue your success goals, and you may encounter interference from old internal patterns. As a matter of fact, this may be why the first 90 days of a new initiative can stir up feelings of doubt, fear and overwhelm.

During the first 90 days, your brain has to shift out of old routines, making room for the newness that you want to introduce into your life. An example of this might see you arriving late for crucial 9am meetings simply because your brain is in the habit of starting your day at 11am. You might even convince yourself that you’re not a morning person. What’s really happening is that your routines are interfering with your big dreams.

Becoming Fluid with Goal Setting Success

This is a reason to stay flexible with goal setting success. To achieve a big shift, you’re going to have to be adaptable. This means that you’re flexible in your thinking, your perceptions and your actions.

To help yourself become flexible, start observing your routines. For instance, at this time in your life, do you stay up until early morning, retire to bed and then absolutely refuse to wake and get out of bed until 11am or later the following day?

Also, do you come up with reasons to avoid face-to-face communications? Have you started to feel more comfortable limiting communications to emails and texts messages? If so, this could signal that you have a pattern of keeping people at a distance. Areas that this pattern could turn into a success barrier for include sales, training, leadership and the arts.

Routines and Pattern Distractions

Pay attention to your routines. Left alone, they could become ongoing distractions. They could become like a bird that won’t stop swooping in on you. Before you know it, you could start to focus on steering clear of the bird to the point that you lose sight of your real success goals.

That’s when life may feel like it’s happening to you instead of like you are creating your life experiences. Therefore, practice awareness. Identify patterns, including thought patterns. Watch these repetitive choices. Don’t let them become distractions.

To change patterns, get up at different times. Take a shower instead of a bath a few days a week or vice versa. Exercise in the morning instead of at night. Move furniture, food items, hygiene products each day. Little changes like these can help get your brain off autopilot, the process that routines hide in.

Goal Setting Using Small Goals

Other ways to stay flexible while you pursue goal setting success, are to break goal planning into small goals. Here’s an example. Let’s say that your desire is to earn six figures a year selling novels that you write.

Instead of trying to sell 25,000 copies of your first published novel within its first month of release, break the aim into little goals. Toward this end, you could create a schedule to write and publish a new novel every three months. Bake in time for a professional, experienced editor to review your manuscripts and offer quality feedback.

Small Goals at Work

Small goals to achieve your desire of earning six figures a year selling novels could include:

• Designing and copying colorful book marketing flyers
• Distributing a certain number of flyers a week, locally and nationally
• Scheduling radio and podcasts interviews
• Completing and submitting author vendor applications to attend cultural, book and arts festivals that attract thousands of attendees
• Preparing content to push out via automated social media platforms
• Developing and mailing postcards that spotlight your books
• Building and promoting your author website
• Setting up relationships with book distributors, bookstore buyers and wholesalers

This list could expand considerably. There’s that much that you could do to promote and market your books, if that’s what you want to do. Monitor your results. Pay attention to which actions get you closer to your goal of earning six-figures a year selling novels that you write.

Achieving Success After Success

But, here’s the thing. It’s important to stay flexible, to remain fluid. Why? Like that bird that seemingly swooped in out of nowhere, you may not be aware of every thing that’s coming. Furthermore, to continue achieving success after success, you will have to adjust small goals.

Who knows? Along the way, you might even have to discard goals that you’d been pursuing for years. So, stay open to change. Learn to pivot.

To stay encouraged, read motivational success quotes in the morning and at night before you retire to bed. Additionally, you might find it helpful to put on earphones and listen to recordings of positive affirmations for success. Twice a year, pause and acknowledge your achievements. But don’t stop. After all, success is not final.

Keep going. Stay flexible. Watch patterns and routines that could transform into distractions. Should you get distracted, refocus on your deepest desires, your largest goals. Break those goals down into small goals, if you start to think that your goals are too big for you, and again – keep going.