If you are anything like Annie, you know what you want and what you need to do to achieve your goals. Annie is a stay at home mum who wants to start up a business so that she can contribute to the family income and not have to keep asking her husband for money for things around the house and her own personal needs. She loves baking and has been the main source for birthday cakes and breads for her neighbours. She knows that to increase her income, she needs to focus on building her business and consider hiring someone and marketing more, but she is still just talking about it to date.

You know where you are and where you want to go, but don’t seem to be making progress. There are four possible reasons for this, pick one or all of them if they fit the bill:

1. Fear that results from moving from the familiar into the unknown. Talking about doing new things is always exciting, but actually doing these new things requires us to change what we are currently doing and that is not easy. Much as we yearn for change, we are very comfortable where we are. 
2. Laziness or a lack of commitment. This is where we make excuses sound so real they almost sound like reasons. this is where rather than do what we know we should do to achieve the goals but we are waiting until we ‘feel’ like it
3. Overwhelm. When we get excited about new things, we take on a lot immediately and then we get overwhelmed. It suddenly seems like there is so much to do and not enough time to get it done and we slowly grind to a halt and put the goal on the shelf for a bit.
4. Losing focus. We start off in a particular direction and then we hear of this good thing we can add to the goal and before we know it, we are headed in a different direction.

Achieving goals requires hard work, sacrifice, dedication and commitment, and consistency over a period of time. As Robin Sharma says, change is not revolutionary – an instant and radical change, rather it is evolutionary – a step by step process that happens over time.