Goal Setting Myths and Traps that Hold Women Back: How to Move Past Your Limiting Beliefs and Achieve Your Potential

By Allison Foskett

Discover the goal setting myths and dangerous goal setting traps that prevent women from achieving their goals. By reading this book you'll save time, money, and prevent endless failures, plateaus, and attempts to give up on your goals. You'll be able to effectively anticipate the drawbacks of goal setting and achievement, and successfully prepare for the hurdles that are ahead.

Achieving your dreams and goals can be a double-edged sword at times. While there are joys and triumphs as one achieves their life dreams, what is less known about are the slippery slopes and goal setting traps that women fall into. Learn the latest scientific research on how goal setting and achievement can harm you, and what steps you can take to stay resilient. This book will help you avoid goal setting burnout so that you can maintain your enthusiasm and persistence while ensuring long-term commitment to your goals. After all, you deserve to achieve your life dreams and goals!

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456612832

Book preview

Author

INTRODUCTION

Did you know that our personal myths on goal setting and achievement often stand in the way of our success?

So, let me ask you this—

What are some of your own personal myths about goal setting, achievement, and personal success that are preventing you from reaching your potential?

What misleading assumptions or myths were passed down through your family or picked up from your friends, mentors, supervisors, or from the media in general?

When it comes to our success, there is no such thing as a right or wrong belief. Instead, we must examine whether or not the mindsets that we hold are actually empowering us and helping us to move forward with the life goals that are most important to us.

Get over the feeling that the two words don’t go together—women and power. The fact is, if we don’t put the two together and don’t understand how power changes complexion in the hands of women, then we’re not going to make it. We have to own our personal power.

Jane Fonda

There is a general notion that our inner mental life determines our outer life. That is, the circumstances that we find ourselves in day to day are, in large part, a reflection of what is going on inside our heads.

Is our thinking limiting us and keeping us small in life, or is our thinking expanding our life context for what is possible?

My motivation for writing this eBook is based on learning lessons from my own personal experiences and from those of my mentors, supervisors, and clients.

Over the past decade, I have been fortunate to work with women of all walks of life who were striving to make personal changes in their lives or accomplish important life goals. Time and time again, I encountered certain limiting ways of thinking that seemed to hold all of us back at times from living authentically and in accordance with the dreams that we set out to achieve.

As a result, I have outlined 11 myths that hold women back from achieving their life potential, as well as seven goal setting traps that prevent women from being able to move forward with their goals.

In pop culture and media, we are constantly hearing and learning about the importance of setting goals and working efficiently toward them. In fact, this was the basis of my first book called How Smart Women Achieve Big Goals.

A parallel part of my journey as I discovered who I was in life and what goals were important for me to achieve was an awakening of the dangers or drawbacks of goal setting.

About three years ago, I had coffee with a professor who began directing me toward some of the research on the negative consequences of goal setting. This immediately peaked my interest, because as an ambitious woman, I knew firsthand how the process of being too ambitious could be detrimental.

While setting and achieving goals is valuable, important, and extremely rewarding, the paradox is that it can be equally exploitive to our mind, body, and spirit if we go overboard with it and follow our socially constructed rules too blindly.

As the cliché goes, we must do everything in moderation. Of course, the paradox of balance holds that there will be times when pursuing our ambitions means we will be out of balance and moving ahead at full steam.

This eBook will help you to realize some of the negative symptoms that indicate when you’re pushing yourself too strenuously, too quickly, or too far. It will help you realize when you need to set limits for yourself and how you can do that.

This eBook is intended to help you become more in control of your own rules around goal setting and achievement so that you are in control of your goals rather than having your goals be in control of you.

Sure, this might seem like common sense; however, it’s amazing what can happen when we put our goals on a pedestal and no longer maintain awareness of other parts of our self.

My hope is that as you read this eBook, the ideas and examples within will help shed light on and develop awareness around ways of thinking that are no longer serving your most authentic goals and life ambitions.

I’ve presented new perspectives and strategies within that will help you to leave these myths behind and get on with living the life that is most important to you. In addition, you might recognize parts of yourself within some of the dangerous goal setting traps.

You’ll want to reflect on what has been happening if you’re caught in one of these traps and whether or not you are sacrificing things, such as health, psychological well-being, and so forth.

If you can avoid these dead-end traps, you’ll break through your plateau in no time and be back on the road to living a meaningful, rewarding, and successful life.

So, let’s begin uncovering these dangerous myths and traps that are holding you back…

SECTION I:

GOAL SETTING

MYTHS

Nowadays, we are bombarded with information and advice from our mentors, peers, colleagues, friends, family members, coaches, counsellors, and of course, the Internet. We listen to their ideas and suggestions and sometimes take their advice to heart. But in the end, we are always left to untangle our own myths and sort through limiting thoughts about what is right for us in order to move forward with our goals.

Pardon the pun, but sometimes the mentality of the self-help culture gets the best of us—good, better, best, and don’t let it rest until you out-do your best! At the opposite end of the spectrum, we fall prey to the myths of the pessimist, anchored and paralyzed by thoughts that prevent us from moving forward at all.

Examining and challenging our limiting beliefs is an integral part of achieving any big goal. And so, as you read through the following myths, I urge you to stop and reflect on how each myth applies to your own journey.

The myths that I describe might not show up in the exact same way in your life, but perhaps you will identify similar ways of thinking that are holding you back from reaching your big goal.

Get ready to debunk and discover the myths that are paralyzing you from taking action….

THE MYTH OF

PERFECTION

There is a perfect time to pursue my goals.

One of the most limiting beliefs that women ever subscribe to when it comes to achieving their goals is the belief that there is a perfect time to begin.

If you subscribe to this limiting way of thinking, your progress and success will be drastically stalled, if not halted altogether.

You may be waiting for the perfect time to begin pursuing one of your life goals. Maybe you’re thinking about taking that big vacation you’ve always dreamed of or finally switching careers.

Think of something in your life that you are waiting to do but are waiting for the right time. Be honest with yourself. Is this something that really needs to wait, or could you begin taking one small action to get started with your dream right now?

According to the perfection myth, there is a perfect time to get started with turning our dreams and goals into reality. Behind this myth is a lot of black and white thinking. There is an idea that, at some point in time, we’ll finally be ready because our circumstances will be just right.

This type of thinking can be observed at the start of each New Year, a time when people feel compelled to ‘do’ something about their goals. Many people actually leave their most important goals until the New Year because they associate a brand new start with high levels of motivation.

Did you know that research demonstrates that it takes many or several New Year’s efforts to achieve one’s life goals (Polivy & Herman, 2002)? So, the best advice might be to get started with your goals sooner rather than later because clearly the achievement of our goals takes time.

We often wait for