3 Ways You May Be Setting Yourself Up To Fail

Only band-aids come in a box.

Real problem solving is like holistic medicine. You have to look everywhere and take all the related systems into account. That's how you attack and prevent them at their root.

Our instinct when we're struggling is to look outward for some external cause and solution.

But you also have to examine yourself, your habits, your mindset, your subconscious defaults and make sure you're not standing in your own way.

3 ways you may be setting yourself up to fail:

1. You set unrealistic goals for yourself.
Goals should be aspirational, but also realistic.
I’m not talking about big-picture goals: ‘I want to grow a successful business around helping people’.

I’m talking about the kind of goals that map out the journey to the big picture goal. The goals that inform and dictate our daily, weekly, and monthly agendas. 

Goals like ‘double attendance at my annual retreat’ or ‘hit $X in monthly recurring revenue by end of year. ‘Create an email marketing campaign to launch next week’ or ‘call all my former clients tomorrow for testimonials’.   

Doubling attendance at your retreat might be a realistic goal…or it might not. Same with hitting revenue goals.

Do you actually have time to get that email campaign out? Have the mental bandwidth to call 20 people for a favour in one day? 

When you set unrealistic goals for yourself, one of two things happens: 

1. You fail to achieve them, which makes you feel lousy about yourself, gets that inner critic going, and undermines your confidence, which hinders your success.

2. You stop holding yourself accountable because ‘there’s no point’, which also makes you feel lousy about yourself, and undermines not only your confidence, but also your productivity, which hinders your success.

Unrealistic goals lead to burnout because you never feel like you’re getting anywhere, your checklist never goes down, and even the busiest days feel unproductive. Worst of all, you disappoint yourself. 

Without that sense of achievement and motivating hits of dopamine to get you through, the everyday slog feels 

pointless and unbearable. 

How to stop setting unrealistic goals: 

• Make sure you’re factoring in learning curves, how much of your goal depends on the cooperation of those outside your control (like clients, strategic partners, service provider help desks, outside agencies…), and everything else demanding your time and attention you have on your plate.

• Remember that everything takes twice as long as you think it will. 

• Organize your goals by ‘want’ and ‘need’ and set timelines accordingly. Not everything has to be done tomorrow, next week, or by the end of the month. 

• Don’t set arbitrary goals. Why double attendance? Why that revenue number? Why next week? Why tomorrow? If you don’t have a firm reason, it’s arbitrary and you’re holding yourself to a meaningless standard.

• Distinguish clearly between your goals and your vision. Your vision or big picture goal is high level and unspecific. Without a timeline and clear, realistic success indicators, you'll never feel like you've fulfilled it.

2. You hold yourself to a standard you can't meet.

You may have consciously developed standards for yourself based on your values, your personal and professional goals, and your view of the world and your place within it.

But you also have unconscious standards that you've inherited from your upbringing, your family, your schooling, your industry, and society at large.

Standards you've never really analyzed because they're built-in, reflexive. Standards about any and everything, all the big and little 'shoulds': When things should happen, how things should be done, where you should be at, what you should be doing, how things should work...but don't. Not always.

And maybe, for you, not at all.

I see this mainly with:

• People who are neurodivergent (and often not aware of it) holding themselves to neurotypical standards.
  The result is a lot of shame, judgment, and self-recrimination for being lazy, unmotivated, disorganized, flaky, slow on the uptake... All things they are really not, but could easily feel hopeless enough to become.

• People who have intentionally turned away from the environment / values/ world views they were raised in or were formerly part of.
  Consciously, they embrace the standards of judgment that reflect their new path, purpose, and personal values. Those are the standards they apply to everyone else.
  Subconsciously though, they're still applying the old default standards they've consciously rejected to themselves. And naturally, failing to meet them. The irony? They don't even really want to meet them. But that doesn't change the sense of failure.

• People whose circumstances are different than the majority of people pursuing the same goal.
  By holding themselves to standards they can't meet--because of time, financial reasons, family responsibilities, disability, neurodivergence, or anything else they cannot change or control--they're not just setting themselves up to fail, they're torturing themselves and the people closest to them in the process.

The first step in all case is to identify those places where you're trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. The square peg being you and the round hole being standards that were not developed by or for people like you.

The next step is facing and accepting yourself and your reality, so you can working with and around the things you can't change.

3. Your personal identity is tied up with any one thing.
Whatever your passion, your calling, your work, or your purpose...there is a fine line between it, and you.

Your identity can't be 'John's wife' no matter how dedicated you are to your relationship.

It can't be 'David and Sarah's dad' even if your whole life seems to revolve around them.

And it also can't be tied to your career, or your professional calling, or the thing you're best known for. It can't even be tied to your personal mission in life.

Those are all things that you do or want to do. Your personal identity is who you are.

And you are much more than any one thing. No matter how important that one thing is.

None of them are 100% within your control. And when things go wrong, as they will in life, or you lose confidence or hope in that one area of your life you've tied your identity to, then it's your entire Self that feels like you're failing.

When in fact, you're not. Not at all. Because you're so much more than any one thing or role you play in life.

I hope you've found some part of this helpful. Thanks for reading!

Have a great week,