In an earlier article we talked about how to establish your core fundamental life goals. That, in itself, is an energising exercise because having a clear idea of where you are going can certainly bring energy and vitality to your life. The next stage is where the “rubber hits the road” so let’s discuss how we start turning that emotional energy into practical energy and physically doing things to achieve our goals.

Often it can be quite difficult, because as soon as we start down that road, we start to find obstacles in our way. Note that we refer to them as obstacles, rather than problems. Thinking of problems can lead to a negative attitude, whereas obstacles set out these issues as things that can be dealt with. Obstacles can be, and often are, climbed, removed or otherwise dealt with, whereas seeing issues as problems have a tendency to make you just sit back and ignore them. 

It was Henry Ford who said: “Obstacles are those frightful things that you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” This is very important. Once you start taking your eye off your goal, those obstacles that you meet just grow in size and become much more difficult to deal with. So if you can look at obstacles in the context of your own goals and what you want to achieve, you find that they can be dealt with better. 

Dealing with obstacles are often a challenge. There are obstacles of every sort and kind: some of them may be financial; some of them may be purely physical; and it is quite common for them to be obstacles of the mind. They are our own fear of going beyond our comfort zone and this is where some sort of partnership with a coach or a life planner is very useful because it gives you the opportunity to talk about your fears and for your coach to help you understand that these are fears that can be overcome. By discussing obstacles, and how to deal with them, with an outside party, you can find that a solution is much simpler than you initially envisaged. 

The old quotation “a problem shared is a problem halved” still rings true and to help resolve it the best practice is simply to talk about it. Conversations are transformational, and conversations about obstacles transform your frame of mind, and the obstacle, into something that can be dealt with very easily and quickly. 

There is an issue of time and speed that we need to deal with here. Obviously, if you have got profound life goals, then you want to achieve them as quickly as possible. However, an approach that is akin to a “bull in a china shop” is often not sustainable and, in fact, limits what we can achieve. What we really need to do, particularly as we move from that boundary of emotional ideas to physical change and action, is just to carry out small steps to do little things to get one going. An obstacle maybe so big that it seems impossible to overcome so breaking it down into component parts and dealing with it in bite-sized pieces can be a way of achieving a speedy resolution. The answer to the question “how do you eat an elephant?” is of course “bit by bit!” The concept of creating sub obstacles and sub-sub obstacles will be very helpful. 

In the next article, we will start to look, in more detail, at some of the internal obstacles that arise from our previous life experience. Often these are obstacles surrounding money, and as life and financial planners we have much experience of dealing with this with clients. This whole concept of internal obstacles is a huge subject in its own right, and we will devote the next one or two articles to it.