One of the most important steps when planning your path toward a goal is to identify the hurdles you’re likely to face. Share on X

That way you can be prepared for them. 

You can design ways to continue moving forward in your quest despite those challenges.

It could be that your friends and relatives are generally supportive of the idea of your goal. However, daily routines are hard for anybody to shake. 

Maybe your relatives are used to relying on you to do certain chores for them. Maybe your friends have always gone out with you to party on the weekend. 

It’s not that they’re trying to sabotage you, necessarily – they just forget how important your dream is to you. They want their own lives to go on as they always have.

It critical for you to gently but firmly maintain your forward progress. 

If the task is something vital to their lives, like picking them up after work so they can get home, then find a way to do it. But if it’s an optional task, explain why you have to pass for now. 

Your time is precious, and this goal is important to you.

Then there are the people in your environment who are actively trying to impede you. 

The pessimists. 

Those who are jealous of your dreams. 

It might make them feel even worse about their own lives if you were to succeed in yours. 

It’s a challenge, but don’t see this as a reflection of yourself. This is an issue with their own world view. They are in a place of unhappiness and the way they feel slightly better is to know others suffer as well. 

If you are able to, distance yourself from people who have this unfortunate mindset. If that is not possible, learn to buffer yourself emotionally from their statements. Take their comments with gentle compassion.

Society as a whole can also work against dreams. 

There are the big challenges we all know about. The biases against a woman who wants to be a firefighter. The biases against a male who wants to be a nurse. But there are all sorts of other more subtle ones as well. 

If your goal is going up against a society expectation, do some research into all the other groundbreaking individuals who followed their dreams when they were told not to. Surround yourself with their images and posters. Remind yourself that you are blazing a trail for those who come after you.

Finally, the most difficult hurdles of all – the guilt and fears within you. 

These can block you from taking the next step even when everything else is aligned with your goal. 

There are three keys to tackling these. 

The first is to have a clearly written statement which reminds you WHY you want to get to this goal. What benefits will it bring to you? Share on X

Second, do daily journaling about your goal. 

Write out the steps you’ve taken and the challenges you will work to overcome. The act of writing about your progress will help you explore and find ways through those issues. 

And finally, engage in daily meditation. 

Meditation helps you view the world with compassionate acceptance. The more you learn to think about issues in a gentle, supportive way, the more your own dreams and goals will become clearer of emotional baggage. 

You will learn to release guilt about the past or fears of the future and instead focus on what you can do in the present moment.

And step by step, day by day, your goals will become a reality!

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