Establishing goals and then promptly losing sight of them is easy. Have you seen the movie, Bridge on the River Kwai, the 1957 Oscar winner for the best picture? You may recall the character played by Alec Guinness (who was better known to younger folks as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars).

“What Have I Done?”

Guinness is commanding officer of his fellow Allies — English and American prisoners of war interred by the Japanese. Guinness’ character becomes enamored in building a bridge, a goal imposed upon him by the Axis powers in control. He loses sight of his larger, more appropriate goal as a member of the Allied troops — resisting his captor’s war efforts.

As an Allied task force moves in to sabotage the completion of the bridge by dynamiting it, Guinness nearly foils the attempt. He had become attached to completing the bridge.

Then, in a dramatic moment of high irony, as he nearly exposes his compatriot saboteurs, he is hit by gunfire. In his last breath, he says, “My God, what have I done?” In his death swoon, he falls on the detonator and sets off the explosion.

Veering Left and Right

You don’t have to see a movie to witness dramatic examples of people losing sight of goals. Consider the politician who ran for office to serve the people, and ended up serving himself. Think about the weight trainer, who perhaps started on his quest with the idea of attaining peak fitness, but instead veered off toward the pursuit of achieving a striking appearance.

Rediscovering What You Lost

Elizabeth Jeffries, a Louisville, Kentucky based trainer and consultant and the author of The Heart of Leadership, suggests that a fundamental way of getting back in touch with your goals when you’ve lost sight of them, particularly if it has been many years, is to engage in a simple exercise.

Recall how you felt when you first assumed your present position: What was your energy level? What were your aspirations? What did you want to achieve? What specific goals did you set for yourself back then, that perhaps have gotten lost along the way?

This exercise works well, whether the time frame has been weeks, months, or even years. By recapturing the initial feelings you had when you first assumed your present position or role, you’re more easily able to get in touch with what was important to you then, and what you had established as important goals.

Revisit Your Goals

Big, important goals have a funny characteristic. Sometimes people fall into the trap of thinking that they know their goals well and the goals are so obvious that they don’t need to revisit their goal sheet – the place where they wrote the goals down, or saved the goals electronically.

Yet, the bigger and more obvious your goal, paradoxically, the more often you may need to revisit it. For that reason, you might keep a wallet-size card in your wallet that lists your goals. As a human being it is so easy to stray from the course, to lose sight of what you established as important. You have to repeatedly be on guard.

What Else Can You Do?

In addition to the suggestions already presented, here are some more ideas for helping you to not lose sight of your goals:

• Post reminders to yourself all over creation, including in your calendar.
• Mail or email letters to yourself that serve as reinforcers.
• Have like-minded others periodically call or e-mail reminders to you. If it helps, have them do it at regular intervals.
• Give yourself the time and space to sit back and periodically view the big picture. If you have to, put this on your calendar.

In the midst of the fray it’s easy to lose direction. Use that plane seat, that trip up the mountain, or that sun deck at the top of your building for reflection.

When You Coast, order tramadol online paypal You’re Toast

It would be wonderful if you could take one or more of your goals and put them on “automatic pilot.” You know, assemble the resources, staff, whatever you need to devise a system, get it up and running, and then, like with a well-oiled machine, only have to check in every so often.

Awake from that daydream and plant your feet solidly on terra firma. You’ll need to stay attuned to the reality that for most of your goals, even long-term maintenance type goals, to coast is to run into a brick wall.

For the Times Are a-Changing

It’s rare that factors in your internal or external environment stay completely the same. Are you among those who’ve been able to maintain your weight for many years past your college days? If so, you may have noticed that you’re eating less now than you did just a few years ago. Why? As you age your metabolism slows down. To maintain the same weight as the years pass, you have to eat less. If you were to coast, and eat at the same levels that you’ve eaten all along, as your metabolism slows, you would gain weight.

Same Game Everywhere

So it is in other aspects of your life and with the goals you set for yourself. To coast in an environment that slowly but inexorably keeps changing is nearly a guarantee that you will venture off course. Like the ship slightly off course at the outset of the trip, if you don’t continually make course corrections, shortly, a small veer to the left or the right will result in a huge veer away from your intended direction.

What are the areas of life in which people have set important goals and then for one reason or another coasted in pursuit of them?

• Marriage
• Raising children
• Planning for retirement
• Maintaining an ideal weight
• Maintaining fitness
• Achieving a balance between work and leisure

If you can give up the notion of coasting in pursuit of your goals, you’ll avoid one of the barriers that stops too many others right in their lounge chairs.

Ritual Behavior that Eats Up Your Life

All people engage in rituals, some of them productive, most of them comforting, and many of them highly unproductive and unworthwhile. Do you have to wait until the top of the hour to get started on a task or activity?

Do you need to over-engage in controlling your environment before getting started?, i.e., sharpening pencils twice, adjusting the venetian blinds just so, getting three phone calls out of the way, putting away three files that you’ve had out for days, and other such behavior? Do you find yourself going down familiar, unproductive paths because you’ve always done things this way, even when you know your could drop the behavior or activity and lose nothing?

A New Personal Era

Perhaps it’s time to reexamine these behaviors in light of the new you — who you are, where you’re heading, who you’ve chosen to be. Setting goals gives you the opportunity to continually move on from where you’ve been.

In the book, No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, edited by Christopher Sykes, the reader learns that when Feynman faced a roadblock or a barrier he was “unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thought, and saying, ‘Now, what have we got here?'”

Feynman apparently was so “unstuck” — the opposite of being steeped in ritual behavior — that when something didn’t work he would simply look at it another way and another way and another way until he could devise an effective way to proceed.

On your path to achieving your goals, while steering clear of barriers, continually be on the lookout for another way to proceed. As one challenge arises after another, you’ll find that this will come in handy.