Three Ps that may be preventing you from achieving your goals
Whether your goals are long term or short term, personal or business focused, the following three Ps can often show up to get in your way.
Now, we can bury our heads in the sand and tell ourselves we’ll get to where we want to be eventually, or we can look honestly at the following three Ps and choose to eliminate them to achieve our desires faster and a lot less ‘painfully’.
What are the three Ps you speak of Vicky?
Great question. They are PERFECTION, PROCRASTINATION, PARALYSIS
Let’s look at how all three lead to you not achieving what you say you want to achieve, whether it’s in your business, friendships, finances, health or relationships, whatever area of life you’d like things to be better than they are at present.
Many people strive for perfection and I’ve written a whole blog on the topic of “Perfectionism: Helpful or Harmful” which highlights the fact that there are positives as well as negatives to being a perfectionist.
1. PERFECTIONISM
Can be described “striving toward impossibly high goals”.
There is nothing wrong with pushing yourself to attain excellence. In fact, the right amount of perfectionism can be partially responsible for helping you achieve the goals you have up to this point.
However, it becomes a problem when the goal is always set beyond your reach.
After all, nobody’s perfect (human beings by default are not perfect beings)… but the goal of a perfectionist is to be perfect. In other words, the goal is to do the impossible!
The perfectionist is caught in a trap – he or she can never be good enough.
Feelings of ‘not good enough-ness” often lead to ANXIETY and chronic stress which can then lead to even more of the other two Ps!
2. PROCRASTINATION
What is procrastination? It’s putting things off, waiting until you have more time or leaving until tomorrow what you could do today. Not working on the stuff you need to do to get what you say you want.
Being distracted far too easily, flitting from task to task. Zen Buddhist author and teacher Cheri Huber is fond of saying: “The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.”
Allowing our perceptions and over-generalised thinking to take over - “It’s going to be hard”, “It’ll take me forever” or “I don’t know how to do it” - means that we can become MASTERS at DELAY and DISTRACTION and what I call stinking thinking: catastrophizing, fortune telling and labelling.
3. PARALYSIS
This is the BIG one, the one that stops goals in their tracks as you lose the ability to make decisions fast, if at all!
Analysis paralysis is an inability to make a decision due to over-thinking a problem. An individual or a group can have too much data. The result is endless wrangling over the upsides and downsides of each option and an inability to pick one, so your goal is now just a wish and a hope.
Change in any area is an A.R.T and the A in A.R.T stands for awareness.
Now you are aware of the three Ps that may be getting in your way.
Letting go of information overload, staying focused on the desired outcome and why you want that outcome in the first place, these are the things that bring you out of the three Ps and enable you to achieve more of the things you’d like to.
If you would like to know more about making change simple and sustainable in all areas of life and health, please do connect with me using the links below.