The moment you set your goals, you set in place the obstacles that will stop you from achieving them. The first step to self-coaching, once you have some meaningful goals is to identify the four types of obstacles that you will face in the pursuit of your goals. Here are the four types of obstacles:

1. Mental Obstacles

These are usually in the form of limiting beliefs, or conflicting values that prevent you from taking intelligent action. You almost certainly have both of these, but they will only become important if they stop you from achieving one of your goals. NLP offers a variety of ways to overcome them, from sub-modality shifts to parts integration and Time-Line Therapy to eliminate ‘Limiting Decisions’. Stick with this blog, and I will soon walk you through each of these.

2. Emotional Obstacles

Being in a dis-empowering emotional state is enough grind your actions and results to a halt. The only ways I know of to overcome these obstacles are to use your ‘Emotional Triad’ and go through a specific sequence of questions that will get you to learn what you can from the experience, and release the disempowering emotions as and when they come up. There are also techniques from Tad James’ Time Line Therapy that will work to allow your unconscious mind to let go of negative emotions.

The objective here is not to permanently remove the emotions from your life, but to understand the message that emotion is trying to give you, decide on what actions need to be taken and thus minimize the time you spend in that dis-empowering state. This is emotional intelligence in action.

3. Physical Obstacles

These could range from you body not being trained to associate pleasure to taking the required goal-achieving actions (like not wanting to get out of bed), or not having enough physical energy, to being in a dis-empowering physical environment.  There are specific strategies you can use that focus on changing the people, places and things that surround you to create a physical environment that is empowering and gives you the space, time and energy you need to creatively undergo your projects and achieve your goals.

4. Spiritual Obstacles

Regardless of what you believe about life, at a certain point your faith and hope must out-weigh your fears and doubts. This will actually go a level deeper than your mental beliefs and work at the level of what the meaning of life is for you. Personally, I have noticed that it actually doesn’t matter what religion you follow, or what sect of that religion you prefer. What matters is how you personally interpret that religion/spiritual tradition to connect to ‘God’, the ‘Universe’, ‘Energy’ or whatever you call it. Is your interpretation of spirituality one that causes you to be the Cause of the consequences in your life, or one that causes you to be at the effect of all the environment around you? This will ultimately have a radical effect on whether you become an achiever or an excuse-maker.

How to Overcome these Obstacles

There are specific self-coaching strategies you can use during the process of moving towards your goals, that will help you to overcome each of these four obstacles. Although I have a great passion for sharing these strategies and getting people to coach themselves as much as possible, it is beyond the scope of this post to go through each one of them in detail. So, I will leave you with a few options of how I can provide you with the most value right now.

The first, cheapest, and possibly best option for a lot of you, is to sign up or bookmark this blog. It is my goal to update it with some articles, podcasts, and videos each week, and update you all by email once per month on the most popular material.  More or less every post will be looking at how to coach yourself to shift and overcome each of these four obstacles in the context of each of the six major areas of life (career & finances, relationships, personal development, spirituality, and health).

The second option is to sign up and attend one of our live trainings, or tele-seminars, details of which you can find on this website. My next event is on NLP Self-Coaching to Achieve your Islamic Development goals, and you can sign up by visiting www.iidr.org

The third option is to utilize one of my 90-day personalized one-to-one coaching packages to achieve a specific result you want in life. Most of what we cover in results coaching is focused on supporting you with the particular strategies you need in order overcome whatever obstacles you are currently facing, to achieve your goal. Once you go through a coaching program, you can use the strategies you learn for the rest of your life, to continue achieving similar goals.