Unspoken Goals

Central to personal development is setting goals. A good goal helps you align your actions so that you make direct progress toward what you most want. The more objective the goal is with measurements, details, and timelines... The more effective because it acts as an even stronger filter.

But setting goals is different than achieving them. For years I was guilty of setting big, ambitious goals, but I didn’t have an action plan to put behind them. Once I learned that each goal needs strategies and tactics, that serve as the most likely path to realizing the goal, that's when I actually started achieving the goals I was setting and making progress in my life.

However, there’s more to it than that. Once you have your goals, strategies, and tactics, there’s still resistance. Even though we have our game plan it still seems like something is getting in the way and it causes us to not follow through.

This is where I want to introduce the concept of unspoken goals. Unspoken goals are the unconscious needs that you want to maintain in pursuit of your consciously selected goal. They’re the conditions your mind wants to make progress within, and oftentimes they come in direct competition with what you’re telling yourself you want. They’re ‘unspoken’ because a lot of the time we aren’t even aware that we have them, and they play a role without us even realizing it.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to double your business in the next year. The strategy is that you’re going to increase lead volume by posting on social media, and the tactic is to post a video on LinkedIn and Instagram 3 times a week. The ‘unspoken goal’, the unconscious need that influences how you show up for that, is that you don’t want to embarrass yourself or look stupid. 

Without conscious effort, your mind wants the ‘unspoken goal’ more than your business growth goal, and since you can’t have both, that’s the goal you get.

When you consciously want one thing but unconsciously want another that exists in direct opposition to the first... it’s called having ‘competing commitments’. As you can imagine, two commitments that are ‘in competition’ battle it out until one wins. In most cases, the ‘unspoken goal’, the unconscious need, usually wins.

This is part of the resistance we always feel anytime we’re pushing for something new. By definition, it’s going to be different from what’s familiar and comfortable, and our unconscious mind will always fight to maintain things as they are. But you are in control, and the people who can navigate the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that comes with growth are the ones who make the fastest progress.

If you want to understand this resistance I'm talking about and see how it works for yourself, I've made a whiteboard video that walks you through it. Click here to watch it!