Were there goals that you have set that you have yet to achieve them? I bet there are. At the same time, were there goals that you have already achieved? I’m sure there are too.
So what made the differences in results? the answer is simply…
The ability to take consistent action.
You see…Setting goals are easy. ‘I want to be a millionaire by age 30′, ‘I want to be healthy and free from diseases’, ‘I want to be married by age 25′. The true challenge is achieving them. Although many people wants, hopes, desire to achieve their goals, only a minority are truly committed to achieving them. Only a minority are willing to invest their effort and time to take action in order to achieve their goals.
What I’ve noticed is that most people tend to procrastinate even when the opportunity to help us achieve our goals comes knocking on our door. Some of them will even give excuses to avoid taking the actions. And even if they do take action, their passion and drive will eventually die down after a while when they do not see the results they want. An example is this:
I have a platoon mate who have set the goal of passing his physical fitness test by the end of our 3-months Basic Military Training (BMT) Phase. And the only station that he is facing difficulties is pull-ups (a.k.a chin-ups) - he couldn’t do any.
Initially, he talks about his goal of doing at least 6 pull-ups almost every day. And he would always go to the pull-up assisting machine to practise his pull-ups. This went on for a week. Eventually, because there were no visible progress (he’s still not able to do a pull-up as I’m writing this post), he started to give all sorts of excuses. ‘I lack the muscles to do pull-up because I am skinny’, ‘I sprained my wrist’, ‘There’s something wrong with my body’.
And the most annoying part? He keeps repeating all these excuses to himself on a regular basis! And even if we want to assist him in his trainings, he declined saying that he ‘don’t want to waste our time’!
I doubt he will ever break his barrier of doing even 1 pull up. Why? He’s only put in 1 week of effort and he expected himself to be able to do a single pull-up! As you can probably tell, I am still annoyed by his attitude and behavior today.
Frankly, I have been there before too. And it took me almost 2 weeks of daily personal trainings to break the initial limit. So from zero, I went to 1. And then after another 2 weeks, I went up to 3. And after 8 weeks in the army, I now can do 6, 7 (updated 19 August 2007) pull-ups. I’m now aiming for 8 pull-ups to get a ‘Silver’ in my physical test.
So what made the difference between the both of us? I dare to say it is the ability to take consistent action. From Day one in the army till now, I’m confident to say that I’ve never slackened off during my physical trainings. And even if it seems as though I’ve not made any progress initially, I decided to hang on and continue participating and putting in my 100% effort in my trainings. That’s probably why I am now sowing the results that I desire.
Now, think about the goals that you have yet to achieve and answer yourself these question honestly: Have you taken any actions to achieve the goals you’ve set? And if you have, have you been putting in consistent effort and hard work?
Dominic Tay is a passionate personal development practitioner and the owner of the ‘Personal Development for Winners’ blog. Learn how to master your mind through personal mastery and break through your current mental limits by adopting the winner mindset so that you can win big in any areas of your life. Click here http://www.DominicTay.com
Tags: goal setting, goals achieving, take action
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