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Posted: Wed 29th Jan 2025
January can be a strange time of year, can’t it? As the clock strikes 12 on 31 December, we can be bursting with enthusiasm and excitement for the year ahead.
We know what we want, we’re excited for it to happen, we’re on it.
But as the month wears on, as ‘normal’ resumes with a side helping of miserable weather and life admin throwing itself between us and where we want to be, those goals can move further away, can’t they? And our enthusiasm decreases in equal measure.
There are many brilliant people out there who don’t manage to reach their goals. It’s not because they’re not capable, far from it, but ‘stuff’ blocks their progress.
In my new book, You’ve Got This, I look at how to achieve goals and overcome the blocks that stop you, drawing on tried-and-tested strategy alongside expert insight from some incredible entrepreneurs, including Joanna Jensen, Theo Paphitis, Charlie Bowes-Lyon, Brie Read and many others.
To help you get to where you want and deserve to be, I wanted to share five common blocks and five ways to overcome them. Do any of these resonate with you?
If you want to achieve big things, you must have a firm foundation to build on. Without a good plan, you don’t have that.
Vague, wishy-washy ideas won’t help you reverse engineer your path, identify micro goals, or create the detail you need to get there.
For example, "I want to increase my turnover", is nowhere near enough detail. Do you want to increase by £10 or £100,000? Do you want to do this tomorrow or by next year?
If you change this into a proper goal, "I want to increase my turnover by £10,000 by December this year", you have something to aim for and something you can work back from, breaking this hefty goal into micro goals that plot your progress and keep you on track.
"So many things to do", I hear you. As a busy mum of two with a very busy business and all the life admin we all must manage on the top, I get it.
Some days you can just look at your to-do list or run through everything you need to achieve in your head and it’s just too much.
Throw a goal in and it’s enough to make you want to run for the hills. But there are ways to tackle this.
One is to break these big projects down into individual steps. Maybe you want to learn about a new subject – let’s say how AI can help your business for the sake of argument.
This feels huge, but if you get more specific and break down every action you need to take, you can weave this into a plan.
Step one could be finding a good provider through Googling, asking on LinkedIn and asking your network.
This doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished that goal but by breaking it down into small steps like this one, you can start to chip away at the big things you want.
We all lead such busy lives and it can be easy to dismiss our big dreams by saying, "I’d love to, but I don’t have the time".
Of course, there will be exceptions to this, but most of us, if we’re really honest, can find small windows of time for things that matter.
It might mean saying goodbye to binging on Netflix or cutting down on social media scrolling, or it could mean you make your ‘dead time’ – things like when you’re on the train or waiting for school pick up, more productive.
Small windows of time add up to big things.
Even those with the hardiest of exteriors can have this little voice that chirps away when they’re attempting big, scary things, "But what if you fail?".
The sad truth is that unless you fully embrace your fear of failure, you’re unlikely to achieve your potential.
The good news is that if you can reframe failure as a learning opportunity, you will no longer see something failing as bad, you’ll see it as a lesson and a step closer to your big goals and dreams.
It’s also essential to remember that because something you tried failed, that doesn’t make you a failure. They’re two very different things.
When we set a big goal, it can help to share this with the right people.
This can help keep us accountable, can help shortcut issues if people have walked that path before, and can help the journey feel a lot less lonely.
The right people cheerlead whether things are going well or not. They celebrate success and soothe during failures. This kind of support network is valuable in the achievement of goals.
However, not all groups are created equal. Whilst the right ones can help us achieve, the wrong ones will have the opposite influence.
The wrong network can sometimes be made up of the people closest to us who just don’t get what we’re trying to achieve.
Maybe it’s the green-eyed monster, or maybe it’s a completely different outlook on life, but we can find that our day-to-day friends can question our ideas in unhelpful ways and make us doubt our journey when they don’t get it.
It’s essential to assess who you share your dreams and goals with. Don’t let someone else decide what’s possible for you, that’s your job!
Of course, there aren't just five blocks. But the good news is that with the right strategy and mindset, you can overcome huge things to achieve your goals.
To find out more, pick up your copy of You’ve Got This from Bloomsbury direct, Amazon and all good bookshops.
