How to Overcome Obstacles and Stay Focused on Your Goals

Christine Li  0:01  
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success Podcast. I'm Dr. Christine Li and this is episode number 124. 

Are you tired of setting goals and not achieving them? Well, you're not alone for sure. But in this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you some amazing tips for overcoming hurdles that might be in your way. Plus, I'm going to introduce you to a quick method for outlining your goals in a logical and effective way. It's called woop. Tune in to this episode, to make progress towards your goals and to achieve the success that you deserve. Let's go listen to the episode together now.

Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they can begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn a powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together. So that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. 

Hello there, it's Dr. Christine Li again. And today we're going to talk about goals and planning for goals and being really, really effective in our process for planning goals and achieving them. In describing how to do this, I'm going to tell you a story about a coaching experience that I had. This past weekend, I coach a group called the Success Lab. It's a program that I run, and we meet weekly on Saturday mornings. And each week, I pose a question or I have a prompt for members, we do brief discussion and coaching. And then everyone in the group goes off screen does their work their chosen task for the moment. And then everybody comes back onto the screen and reports, their wins. Typically everybody is successful at doing what they've chosen to do. And then we go off and we enjoy the rest of the weekend. So that's the Success Lab. And I describe that to you because the prompt this weekend was to describe the obstacle that you feel is in your way currently. Now there's a backstory to that as well, just before meeting with my success lab members, I was doing a meditation through an app called Insight Timer. And in that meditation, the person described a way to set up goals. Using the woop method, W O P, W stands for wish. O stands for outcome. O stands for obstacle. And P stands for plan. Now I went and googled all of this just for this episode. And it turns out that this is a visualization exercise to help people to really get clear on what's necessary for getting a goal accomplished. So the first step is to envision what you want to have happen. But really, again, to visualize what you think everything's going to look like how you want it to come out, be very detailed about it and describe the wish to yourself. The second step is to visualize the outcome, how is it going to happen? What's going to be necessary? How are you going to be feeling again, using your powers of pre visualization in the process of setting this goal. The third step is to try to predict what obstacles might be in your way. And I'm going to assume that that means both external obstacles like I'm going to run out of gas in my car, but also internal obstacles. So I'm going to feel too nervous to get up on stage, things like that. So you make a list of the obstacles that you might come across. And then the final step is to make a plan to get your goal while overcoming the obstacles that you've envisioned in step three. So it makes a lot of sense, right? You want to envision what your endpoint is first, and then try to decide and predict what are the hiccups that are going to be in my way or along the way hiccups along the way and then you just make it happen after that. That's the idea of whoo So I liked that easy acronym W. O P and I went straight to my success lab members, and decided to take a shortcut and start our conversation by just asking the members, what is your current obstacle. And the conversation was really interesting, and I learned a lot about them. But I also learned a lot about how we as humans, are very creative and crafty when it comes to being stuck, and seeing obstacles and envisioning obstacles in our way. So before I tell you the full story about what the success lab members told me, I'm going to describe my thoughts about whoop, and how you can make woop work for you and how you can get your goals to transpire to occur as quickly as possible. The first tip that I have for you, is you want to make sure that in every moment, you are moving your process forward. So you're either planning, you're visualizing, you're going to the gym, you are pumping yourself up, you are telling people about your goal, you are believing in yourself, and you're taking action steps to move yourself forward. And I describe to my success lab members that the word Scrum is a term that's used in rugby. And apparently the term scrum means a formation of players. But the word scrum has become a to mean teamwork, it means that everybody who's involved has their focus on moving the ball forward, so that everyone on the team has the same goal. And everyone is interested in moving everything forward. So I describe that to my success lab members. And I'm describing that to you because if you are currently feeling like you have nowhere to move the ball, you have nowhere to proceed, listen further. Okay, the second step that I have for you is that there really is no room are no time for you to be stuck. I know we can feel stuck, oftentimes. But I believe that all feelings and experiences of being stuck. They're all temporary. Because really, there's always an answer, there's always something that's going to happen next, there's always another decision that you can make, there's always another action step that you can decide you're gonna take, there's always a way that you can shift your mindset so that you don't feel the same way or so that you don't perceive the situation in the same stuck way. And also, you can always get support, there are always multiple different options for you to get moving again to make progress again to get unstuck. So the next time you feel stuck, quickly, remind yourself ah, Christine Lee on that podcast episode reminded me that stuck is just an illusion of my mind of my heart. And I don't have to stay stuck for very long. The third step that I have for you is to notice that in the whoop system, wish outcome obstacle plan, nobody's describing a step where you need to predict your own downfall. Or where you need to doubt yourself or speak negatively about yourself or criticize yourself harshly. Whoop is just a very pragmatic logical system. And we as emotional, sometimes illogical human beings, we sometimes add these steps to our goal setting processes. And I'm here to remind you, that there really doesn't have to be that negativity or those negative predictions in your goal process, you can move forward, like a rugby player, like a full charging ahead person, almost like a robot with no feelings because you've got a plan, you've got a vision for the outcome, you know, the obstacles that might be in your way and you've got to plan for that. So get excited for approaching your life in this brand new way where you feel that there's really nothing that can hold you back for very long. The fourth idea that I have for you here is that you want to stop focusing on your obstacles. We should all be focusing on our goals and so many of us spend so much time fretting about the obstacles fretting about how we're going to look how it's going to sound is it long enough? Is it short? Enough isn't good enough, will I be judged all those things that's having your focus be on the obstacles, rather than on the end goal. And when you have your eye on the end goal all the time, you can stay the course you can do the long workouts, you can do the writing, you can get up on stage, anything that you like you can do. 

All right now to that story that I was alluding to before about what happened when I asked my success lab members that their current obstacles or and we went around person to person. And we had a great conversation because of course, we can get stuck by physical clutter, we can get stuck by thoughts about how little time we have, it can run the gamut, of course. But what I noticed as we moved through member by member and had conversations with each other is that sometimes we believe that the very thing that we want to accomplish is the obstacle. So I'll give you an example. So let's say you want to live clutter free. But when I asked you what is your obstacle, you would say to me, well, the clutter, it's just so overwhelming. So basically, you're in this never ending loop with yourself, where the very thing that you want to get rid of, is also the thing that's blocking you. And so there's never really a pathway through because you're always staring down and staring at the obstacle, you're not really remembering or reminding yourself that there's a bigger goal in mind, the real goal is to clear and clean kitchen, it's not so much getting the clutter, piece by piece out. That's the method. But we don't want to mix that up by starting to think that that's actually our goal that I'm starting to get mixed up in describing this too. So to be clear, I want to say to you that don't get lost in the obstacle. Stay very, very clear. In remembering what your goal is why you started this process in the first place, why is important to you, and the vision you have for yourself. For when it's all said and done. When you're through with the process, the scrum process, the whoop process, whatever process you're going to use, to address the issue to get to your goal, it's going to be great, but only if you are real with yourself about what the obstacle is. And you remain clear that you're the one responsible for taking care of the obstacle that you're not going to let any stories about clutter, or your schedule or time or your energy level block you from really taking care of your big goals. So to wrap up, I want to remind you to use whoop, as just one method to get excited about getting more done getting important things done, getting rid of procrastination and maybe even clutter. So as a reminder, whoop is wish, outcome, obstacle and plan. And you can set up these steps one by one, it doesn't really have to be linear. But do think for yourself. How can I get myself through to the finish line in a very logical, very rational, very efficient way without getting caught up? In my stories about my obstacles? I don't want to focus on my obstacles anymore. That's what I suggest you say to yourself, we don't want to get stuck in thinking and planning, thinking and planning do have their place and they're very valuable, of course. But if all we're doing is thinking and planning are not going to get very far at all. The other thing that I learned from talking with my wonderful success lab members is that it always helps to verbalize and identify what is going on with our process. Without having this conversation. I think people might have stayed stuck. I might have not realized that my members and students were stuck in this way. So I learned a lot from this conversation. And that's why I wanted to share it with you too, in the hopes that it also brought you some light onto your own struggles with getting some goals that you're struggling with. Now accomplish. Let's get rid of the struggle. Let's get much more clear. Let's do some Whoopty whoop And let's find success in our days every single day. That's my wish for you. And for me too. If you're interested in joining me in the Success Lab, feel free to send me a direct message. You can also take a look at a webpage that I have with a very complete description about everything that's included in the Success Lab, which involves weekly coaching with me on Zoom. So it's really high touch. It's really fun. The members are amazing, wonderful, smart, supportive people. And I would love for you to consider joining, you can go to that page by going to make time for success. podcast.com/lab. Again, it's make time for success. podcast.com/lab I know you're going to make great things happen with the whoop system. And by not focusing solely on the obstacles that might be in your way. I wish you all the best. Have a great rest of the week. I will see you next Thursday when the next episode drops. Bye bye. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. We'll talk to you soon!

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