Not knowing exactly what you want, or knowing that but not keeping it in mind, makes it very hard to remember what you need to do or why. If you don’t have a clear, short explanation of your goal that you could give anyone who asked at a moment’s notice, talk with a friend or write down your ideas until you can summarize your goals without even having to think about it. Then make sure to tell yourself about your goals regularly.

2. Trying to pursue more than one goal at a time

While it’s not absolutely impossible to pursue more than one goal at a time, doing so dilutes attention, focus, and mental resources. We only have so much time, attention, and effort we can put into changing our lives: trying to do more than one thing at a time is inviting trouble. What’s the single most important goal you have in front of you? Once you’re well on your way with that single, most important goal, it might be possible to get started on a second one.

3. Not being committed

Being committed to a goal means accepting it, taking complete responsibility for it yourself, and being willing to submit to the changes it will require in your life. (See Why Self-Reliance Requires Surrender.) If you’re not fully committed to your goal, feelings of resentment or rebelliousness, or a tendency to blame forces outside yourself for being in the situation you’re in, will block you from moving forward.

4. Failing to plan out specific steps

Knowing your goal is important, but in order to make real progress toward it, you’ll need to know exactly what you expect yourself to do. At any moment, you’ll need to know what the step you’re working on is and what the next step will be when you’re done with that.

5. Not setting aside time

You won’t make much progress toward your goal if you don’t set aside time to work on it. If you just try to fit it in when you have spare time, you’ll find your goal often gets lost in the shuffle.

6. Not keeping up a feedback loop

Having a feedback loop means stopping regularly (at least once or twice a week) to look carefully at what you’ve been doing to reach your goal and noticing what you need to work on, pay more attention to, improve, handle differently, or keep up. Some techniques for doing this include journaling, meeting with a group, blogging, participating in an online forum, or talking with a friend who’s helping you keep on track.

7. Not paying attention to your thoughts

Building willpower or reaching a goal means changing habits, and changing habits means paying more attention to when decisions are arising and what factors are influencing our decisions. Bad choices are very often choices that we rushed past or didn’t think carefully through at the time. Understanding what’s going on in our own minds when making choices doesn’t always get us to make better choices, but it’s a necessary step to getting better and better at making those choices. For one way to become more aware of your choices and thinking, read How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging.

8. Not enjoying the steps

It’s easy to think of the steps we need to take to reach a goal as being painful or difficult, but finding the pleasure in those steps simplifies everything. See Using enjoyment as a tool to reach goals.

9 Not preparing

If we wait until we’re actually faced with choices, we may not be prepared to tackle them well. Some choices even pass by before we realize they were coming, unless we prepare by looking ahead. An example is lateness: being on-time means planning intelligently for when to leave for an appointment and getting everything ready beforehand so that it’s possible to leave at that time. Even for choices we recognize as they come up, we may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to tackle them. Paying attention to broken ideas, meditating, and organizing are some of the techniques we can use to prepare ourselves to do better.

10. Taking setbacks too hard

Changing habits is hard, and doing a difficult thing day after day often means some short-term setbacks or failures. Failure doesn’t need to be a pattern: it can be taken as a learning experience. Consider that if a person is trying to quit smoking, their chances of succeeding are much higher if they have tried and failed to quit smoking before than if they had never tried. Even failure is a step forward. It’s not trying at all that we have to watch out for.

Luc Reid is a writer living in Vermont with his 12-year-old son. he has been reading, researching, and writing about cognitive psychology, positive psychology, strengths psychology, nonviolent communication, cooperative living, consensus decision-making, and other topics having to do with personal and community growth for about ten years now. His practical articles on the psychology of self-motivation and willpower appear three times a week at http://www.willpowerengine.com . (c) 2009 by Luc Reid. Willpower Engine articles are free to copy under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.