Obstacles! – Overcoming The Orange Barrels of Goal Setting

If you’ve been working for any length of time on reaching Goals, you know it doesn’t take long for Overcoming Obstacles to become a thing.

What’s important to remember is, this is just part of the process.

 

Chances are good that within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of starting towards your Objectives, Roadblocks began popping up. They come from everywhere. Sometimes they are simple to deal with, sometimes they are major problems. One thing is for sure, you need to be Overcoming Obstacles to keep moving forward.

Here are a few strategies for dealing with Roadblocks threatening to derail you from reaching your next milestone.

1. 1. Change your Perspective on the Barriers

      One of the important concepts behind achieving your goals is the documented ability for your brain to start making reality conform to your visualizations. There is nothing metaphysical about it, it’s just a manifestation of the process of overcoming barriers.

      Look at barriers and obstacles as the work you have to do to make your dreams more real because that is exactly what’s happening as you overcome them!

   2. Treat the Process of Overcoming a Barrier as a Mini Goal

      Use the Goal Setting skills you are developing to break down the barrier by the same step by step process that you are using for your goals. Often you will find barriers fall apart quite easily once you begin the process of dismantling them.

   3. Never Interview Ducks

      

      The idea is that ducks tend to say the same thing over and over again. You can’t get much useful information or any real value out of the time you spend with them. Learn to recognize when you are being distracted.

   4. Sometimes We Create Our Own Barriers

      As strange as it may seem, it’s not unusual to feel a little apprehension even though you appear to be having many successes. Most people don’t like too much change. Again, this is completely normal. Take a look at the barrier and determine if it’s you, yourself, who might be making it harder to get past.

   5. If needed, Reassess and Make Adjustments

      If your dream to swim the English Channel is being thwarted by your need to first learn how to swim, then it’s time to make a few adjustments.

      Of course, your ultimate goal can still be to swim the Channel, but you will put more focus into overcoming that obstacle of learning to swim. It basically becomes a Goal in itself and you need to treat it like one.

UPDATE: Dirk’s Goal! Overcoming Obstacles!

Item #5 (above) is applying to my goal of making a film by the end of the year (see last month). It’s my version of wanting to swim the English Channel. Figuring out how to pay for it is the learning to swim part of that.

I set a goal of March 15th to have a script available that I could start breaking down to figure out a budget. This is the big reality wake-up call for an independent filmmaker. One can be one’s own worst enemy while writing a rough draft of a script. I kept thinking about how much it would cost to do this or that and it slowed me down.

Of course, this had to stop or else the script would never get written. My rough drafts are usually everything plus every sink in the house.

This, my Mighty Moose Overcoming Obstacles Allies, is going to be a low budget production. We aren’t going to be able to dazzle with SFX. We have to be more attentive to our story than anything else.

There are many great examples of high quality yet very low budget story intensive films.  The Blair Witch Project, Primer, Clerks, and Eraserhead are some excellent examples.

If I can get a script done and a budget created by the end of March, I should still be on track. Ha! If. Next month we talk about Habits and if this is going to work, that is huge.

We also have a lot of amazing stuff going on at Mickey Mart this year. I’m very excited about all that, so I have to make sure there’s enough time to do both! Phew!