It is very close to the end of January. How many of your goals have you stopped working on? I spoke with someone today who had dropped the ball on one of his goals. When I asked him why? He said, "I have just not gotten around to it." His next comment was revealing. He decided the goal "was not important anyway."

This conversation started me thinking about how we set ourselves up for failure. First, we might have a small lapse or miss the first deadline, next we start rationalizing that we didn't want to achieve that goal anyway.

The rationalization keeps the discomfort from getting too close protecting us from thinking about how we have dropped the ball. This sort of mental mapping seems to happen automatically or so quickly that other than a vague 'not right' feeling we seem to lose awareness of what we are up to.

The next time you find yourself saying or thinking "I didn't want that anyway" mark that as a mental sticky note to remind you to take another look at that goal. Did you choose the wrong goal or are you getting to a place where the climb up the hill is starting to get rough and you are not sure if you can make it?

A way to avoid this dilemma is to notice when you first feel the twinges of prickly fear or discomfort breaking out because you are feeling a hint that you could fail to meet a goal.

Check in with someone, talk it out. Try breaking your goal down into smaller parts and see if you can move forward on only one of the small parts.

For example, I was starting to feel like I was not going to be able to finish a series of articles by my deadline. I wanted to finish badly, but I continued to stare at a blank page. I made a deal with myself. I didn't have to write an article, instead I would write a blog post.

A blog post is shorter and tends to have a more informal writing style. As I worked on the post I felt my writing muscle began to loosen up and the ideas started trickling in. I can't say they were flowing at this point, but I was content with trickling. Once I lowered my expectations and began the process of writing, that act opened up other ideas that allowed me to crank an article out with much less effort after the blog post was complete.

Looking back I can see that I was developing a mindset that an article was too much work right then. By allowing myself to just do a short post I got the writing ink cranked up and was able to get the article out. When you see yourself backing away from your goal and telling yourself you didn't want to accomplish that goal "anyway" be suspicious.

Indifference is a comfortable mask for fear and fear is good at masking as procrastination. When you are not achieving what you set out to achieve treat it as a puzzle. Don't just accept it. Investigate it and you will get back on track much sooner