Perhaps it's fair to say, some of us find ourselves stuck in a rut. Oracle found that while 80% of people are ready for a career change, 75% of people feel stuck professionally and 27% said they were trapped in their routine. So what's preventing people from making changes? 

Below, I've outlined all the major ways people fail when it comes to setting and smashing their goals.

Informed by academic research and my own learnings as Co-founder of Evolve Journey, with experience guiding thousands of journalers through their own goal-setting journey. 

How To Fail Your Goals 

Take On Too Many At Once

The classic January 1st overwhelm.

You go from three mince pies a day to trying to run three miles a day, only eating chicken and broccoli whilst aiming for the most successful quarter of your career.

All at once. 

An absolute overload of priorities creates a lack of focus, making it harder to achieve any of them.

Habits and routines take time to change.

So, whether your goal is to introduce a positive habit or cut a negative one, taking on too much at once makes all goals less likely to be achieved.

Once one falls by the wayside we often see a drop in motivation. As what could have been fades into a distant memory that maybe, just maybe, we’ll pick up next year.

Research by Locke and Latham (2002, 2006) showed that setting high and specific goals can improve performance whilst taking on too many can lead to a lack of focus and overwhelm, making it difficult to achieve any of them. 

Actionable Takeaway:

1. Write down everything you want.
2. Pick ONE top priority and focus on this, and this alone to increase the chance of success. But remember, success at the expense of a healthy balanced life, is not sustainable. 

Quit When It Gets Hard

Take signs of frustration, anxiety and fear as a signal to quit instead of progress in achieving the goal. 

Generally speaking, where there is fear there is personal growth.

The very fact that you doubt you can do something means you are about to stretch yourself and do something that before you didn’t know you could.

Self-confidence builds over repetitions of your inner bitch telling you to quit because it's too hard, because in the moment it seems impossible. But, by powering through regardless you build an undeniable stack of evidence that proves you can improve and grow. 

Reframe setbacks as learning opportunities. Facing challenges and pushing through them can enhance self-belief and motivation, as discussed by Seo and Ilies (2009). Reflect on your progress, you’ll be surprised how much you’ve improved since you started.

Set Goals That Are Too Big Or Too Small

When a goal is too small the brain isn’t motivated enough. It simply doesn’t turn us on, so we lack the motivation to make it happen. 

The more challenging a goal, the more it arouses the brain. But there is a limit, if something is completely and utterly unrealistic then it will end in demotivation. 

Pick something just outside of reach that you are excited to achieve. This will give you the fire to stretch yourself and give you a nice sense of accomplishment. Look for the goldilocks of goals, just the right amount of attanaibiltiy and challenge to optimise your performance and motivations.

Be Unspecific

Without specificity, it’s difficult to know when you have or haven’t achieved anything. 

‘Be proficient in Spanish’ is not good enough. 

If the end goal is hard to quantify make sure the actions are quantified. 

Example Goal: To attain B1 Spanish level I am going to complete 2 hours of lessons, 3 hours of private study and reading per week for the next 3 months. 

Don't Write Your Goals Down

Writing down your goals daily makes you 42% more likely to achieve them.

Not putting pen to paper leaves you open to a lack of accountability. It makes it too flexible, it can change at will in your head. 

Marcus Aurelius — 'If you don't have a consistent goal in life, you can't live it in a consistent way.'

 

In the Evolve Journal we have a daily prompt where you write your goal (or Domino as we call it). The one goal that, when knocked down, creates a ripple effect of positive outcomes. 

Tell The World And Not Yourself

A common pitfall I see is when people look for accountability and reward from others. They try to shortcut straight to reward by looking for social kudos and validation of the goal, when at that moment in time, it's just an aspiration. 

Finding intrinsic motivation and keeping a goal close to your chest is a much cleaner source of fuel than looking externally.

While it’s important to maintain a clear personal vision, it’s also wise to have an easily explainable, non-threatening goal to share with others.

For instance, if you’re working at a corporate company, you might not want to broadcast your dream of setting up your own business or becoming an artist and leaving the corporate world behind. 

Instead, share a simpler, more relatable goal that allows you to chip away in peace at your own pace. The master plan can be just for you, something special and personal.

Visualising Only Success And Not Failure

You may have heard of positive visualisation, the act of visualising completing a successful action with the aim of making it more likely to actually happen. 

Martin et al. (1993) suggests that anticipating potential obstacles and planning for them can be even more effective in ensuring goal completion. 

The research shows that thinking more about how you would feel failing the goal and predicting some of the ways you may go wrong is a wholistic tactic to ensure goal completion. 

If you’ve been disappointed with your progress and feel your dream life is getting further away by the day, changing the way you do things to get different results is actually the only way to break through.

So, we have put together a FREE Goal Setting Guide to help you pinpoint a specific goal and provided you with a blueprint to help you achieve it. 

Where could you be in the next 6 months?

1. It's in our nature

Animals can be instinctively selfish, evident when birds squabble over food, with the most courageous or brutish often flying off with the biggest scrap.

However, many more collaborative relationships exist in nature.

For example Oxpeckers, who perch on large mammals eat ticks, dead skin, and other parasites. The birds get food, while the mammals get pest control.

This sort of reciprocal altruism is common in the animal kingdom and is based mainly on the expectation of a personal return. 

For example, Vampire Bats share their food with those who had an unsuccessful hunt with the expectation that the favour will be returned, those who renege on the deal are blacklisted by the colony.

We are not so different, giving with expected return is the backbone of our capitalist society. Loans with interest ensures that resources can move fluidly through an economy so they can go where they will work the hardest allowing the whole economy to grow and prosper.

Humans are hardwired in many ways to engage in altruistic behaviour through theories like inclusive fitness, which suggest that helping others, even at a personal cost, ensures the survival and reproduction of shared genes. 

We do good because it also helps us.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little, but giving to others brings the greatest riches of all. — Plato

2. Building Social Bonds

Historically, giving to others has strengthened social bonds, making groups more cohesive and more likely to survive and thrive. Historically, groups formed in part to protect against overly aggressive and destructive individuals, ensuring that kindness prevailed over time and for the most part the bad guys nastiness left the gene pool.

Humans have historically given to others because of social bonding. Giving to others strengthens ties between individuals and groups, making the collective stronger and more likely to survive. Research has found that altruistic behaviours are present in all human societies, indicating that kindness is a universal human trait.

By promoting cooperation and mutual aid, giving helps build a sense of community and belonging, which is essential for a stable and thriving community and society.

3. Physical Health Benefits

Acts of kindness and altruism have been shown to improve physical health. Helping others reduces blood pressure and cortisol, a stress hormone, which directly impacts stress levels.

These changes can lead to better blood pressure and heart health.

Research in volunteering, a good proxy for kindness, is associated with a longer lifespan; older adults who volunteer have a 44% lower mortality rate over a five-year period than those who do not. 

In the worlds longest happiness study done by Harvard, they found that relationships were one of the biggest predictors of a long and happy life. Kindness and giving to others is a great way to maintain strong bond with others.

Engaging in altruistic behaviours can thus contribute to a healthier, longer life.

4. Mental Health Benefits

Spending money on others promotes happiness more effectively than spending it on oneself.

Research replicated across various studies and countries (rich and poor) shows that people experience more joy from giving to others than from spending on themselves.

Volunteering and acts of kindness lead to higher life satisfaction, a greater sense of purpose, and lower rates of depression and anxiety. 

Altruism activates reward areas in the brain, creating a positive feedback loop that enhances overall happiness.

5. Creating Positive Ripple Effects

You never know the ripple effect your small gesture can have.

Kindness can inspire others to act similarly, creating a chain reaction of positive behaviour. While the immediate impact of a kind act may not always be visible, its long-term effects can have a butterfly effect opening new opportunities that can be unpredictably far-reaching. 

Kindness makes us better people and contributes and makes everyone have a nicer time. Smile and the whole world smiles with you.

In a world increasingly detached and digitised, it's easier than ever to get caught up in your own goals and personal development to the detriment of helping others. 

Reflection can be a powerful tool to help you find a balance of self development that doesn’t become selfish.

Modern life has many of us so detached from the outcomes of our words, it is easier than ever for people to be dicks without consequences.

Some people fall into this trap perhaps because the digital world flips our natural tendencies and online unkindness has a sort of attention-grabbing virality about it that encourages the opposite of love and kindness.

However, by actively choosing kindness and giving, we can counteract these tendencies and create a better world for everybody.

As Ryan Holiday says, "We do it because it's right, because people deserve kindness, and because kindness makes us better."

 1. Consider Your Future Self

The other day, I bumped into an old friend in the park. He was still in the same place in life as when I last saw him three years ago—same job, small city centre flat, no girlfriend, and a live-for-the-weekend mentality. After catching up with our mutual friends, he expressed his frustration, saying,

“Bloody hell, you lot are making serious moves. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t planned to live past 30, and now in my mid-thirties, I don’t have much to show for it. I’m a bit annoyed actually.”

This friend had embraced a hedonistic mindset of living fast and dying young. In the short term, he was kind to himself by indulging heavily. However, he neglected his health and failed to build a solid foundation for the future. Now, he wants to escape the party lifestyle but has nothing to fall back on.

Don’t borrow happiness from the future. Make choices today that are friendly to your future self.

 2. Negative Emotions are Unsustainable Fuels

Anger, disgust, and disappointment in yourself are not sustainable fuels. While they might provide short-term motivation and energy to achieve results, in the long run, they are detrimental. Just like the dirtiest fuel sources, these negative emotions will eventually harm you and those around you. Berating yourself into burnout doesn’t help you or your goals.

3. Be Your Own Best Companion

Spending a holiday with someone persistently negative is hard work (I've been there). Everything seems to be a problem, and it's even worse if they are rude and egregious to others. Nothing is ever good enough. The only person you will never have a holiday away from is yourself. You are inescapable. So treat yourself with kindness, rationality, and fairness, just as you would a friend.

People see massive gains from working with the right coach in almost every area of life. This is because we often have unrealistic expectations and a poor understanding of our actions and abilities. Coaches help cut through the nonsense, providing factual and helpful advice because they are detached and can be objective.

So, how can you be your own coach?

Treat yourself like a friend or loved one and give yourself advice accordingly. That’s why in our tried and tested daily system, we don’t write responses to prompts like ‘How could I improve?’ or ‘What could have gone better today?’ Instead, we write advice for our future selves

This approach solves a few things:

1. It prevents us from writing about insignificant issues that won’t matter in the future. We don’t sweat the small stuff.
2. By maintaining a close relationship with our future selves, we have more incentive to set ourselves up for success. We make healthy decisions that are kind and avoid behaviours that will make our future selves suffer.
3. It means treating yourself like a friend, offering helpful and rational advice that stands the test of time. You extract lessons from your experiences, hoping they will make you a better person.

This journaling prompt has personally helped me remember lessons such as:

‘relationships are your most important asset, don’t neglect their investments’ or ‘remember not to attach your happiness to external outcomes’ - direct quotes from my own personal Evolve Journal.

Being kind to yourself is an act of self-discipline; it’s not something that comes naturally to me. However, since I started reflecting regularly in this way, my automatic reactions have shifted, and my self-talk has become similar to the advice I would give a friend.

I no longer beat myself up; instead, I aim to build myself up.

Make yourself better—that’s what friends do.

- Freddie, Co-founder of Evolve Journey