Frustration can slow or derail progress toward goals. Since everyone gets frustrated, instead of giving up, act constructively. Try these powerful ways to overcome frustration and achieve your goals.
Frustration: 11 Powerful Ways to Overcome It and Achieve Goals
When a lack of progress toward goals increases your frustration, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion and miss the bigger picture. Goal achievement isn’t a straight-line process. Often, the learning curve takes many twists and turns before it flattens out and heads toward a desired goal.
In the meantime, when frustration threatens to overwhelm you and cause you to dismiss your goals, get it together. Take constructive action. Find new ways to help you get back on the path toward realizing your goals.
Frustration: You Always Need a Plan
When frustration or any powerful emotion gets in the way of a goal, you need a plan to overcome it. Otherwise, the results will be far less favorable.
- Create a plan.
- Be willing to stick to it even though some aspects of the plan or the events surrounding it may prove frustrating.
- This does not mean everything you do today must be laid out. In the beginning, this might be appropriate, even a clever idea.
- Over time, however, your daily schedule and routine will become second nature. You’ll know what to do because you’ve done it repeatedly.
However, even with daily schedules, frustration can wreak havoc. Suppose you cannot make it to a regular appointment because of work or family. Unexpected circumstances can alter your plan. You can still tend to your needs but may need to address them differently.
What to Do
The point is always to have a plan and a backup. This can help reduce frustration. With more than one plan, you have options. You don’t feel powerless over events, which increases your self-confidence while reducing frustration.
Flexibility Is Essential
Here’s another observation: Plans should never be cast in stone. If you feel you must stick to the plan you’ve created, what will you do when life intervenes, and the plan goes haywire?
You Can’t Force the Plan
The more you force the plan to work, the more frustration you’ll feel. As the stress builds from mounting frustration, so does your anxiety and a sense that the plan is slipping away. None of this makes you feel any better and can cause you to abandon the plan as unworkable.
Many individuals fail to consider that by remaining flexible, they can find additional solutions to frustrations that prevent goal achievement. Maybe you are frustrated that you never have enough time to finish things each day, so you feel exhausted and overwhelmed.
What to Do
Does what you must do require that you cannot deviate, even a little, from the plan? If you think about your daily routine and the tasks you involve yourself in, isn’t there some breathing room?
- In other words, look for opportunities to do things differently.
- Try doing them in a different order.
- Consider rearranging priorities so there’s more time to devote to more immediate goals.
Granted, it takes removing yourself from the situation to think logically about what is happening. The key is to remain as flexible as possible. With practice, you’ll improve, and your frustration will decrease. Furthermore, you’ll be making progress toward goals.
Set Reasonable Expectations to Overcome Frustration
Learning to overcome frustration is like adopting a new lifestyle. It takes time to get used to it. Also, this time varies from one person to another.
Naturally, you want to get as much done toward your goals as quickly as possible. But forcing the issue, putting yourself in situations, or taking on challenges you’re not ready for also adds to your frustration and defeats your goals simultaneously.
How to Set Reasonable Expectations
How do you avoid this? One way is to set and manage reasonable expectations. While you may want to tackle the biggest, most complex challenge on your to-do list, now may not be the best time.
The adage that you must walk before you can run is appropriate here.
- It is better to start with more short-term projects, tasks, challenges, issues, or duties before taking on big ones.
- These should be things you feel comfortable doing, have the knowledge and skill to accomplish, and have enough time to complete.
- Put succinctly, work on the easy ones first.
This gives you practice accomplishing goals you set for yourself, establishes a pattern of success, and makes you feel good about achieving results. It also helps reduce frustration if you overload yourself with doing it too soon.
Try Not to Take Things So Seriously
Life is a pretty big deal. Everyone has turmoil, frustration, challenges, and triumphs. Sometimes, it can seem like you’re treading water and never getting close to your goals. However, you likely take yourself too seriously when you push yourself too hard.
What to Do
Here is a suggestion that may help. Imagine how you will feel about a current upsetting or frustrating concern in six months.
- If you think this is nonsense, recall what upset you six months ago. Can you name it? Did it resolve itself or go away due to the action you took?
- Even if it bothers you now, it won’t have the same effect or importance six months from now. This should help you stop taking yourself so seriously.
Summary: Lighten up and learn to take things in stride. This will significantly reduce the frustration that keeps you from your goals.
Overcoming Frustration: Learn From Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. Some are colossal blunders, while others are minor. Yet, most are somewhere in between.
What to Do
However, it isn’t the mistakes you make that matter. What matters is what you learn from them. Indeed, no one relishes failing on a project or achieving less than the expected result. That hurts, undeniably.
- But there is always something you can figure out about what happened that can serve you well for the next time.
- You may learn about things to avoid in the future.
- Slow down and carefully consider things before rushing ahead. In hindsight, you would have done things differently. That’s learning from what happened, so you’re smarter the next time.
While making mistakes is frustrating, if you gain something positive from the experience, you gain valuable insight and help reduce the frustration accompanying it.
Keep a Positive Attitude
Attitude is everything. Regarding how you live your life, attitude can make the difference between considerable progress toward goals and giving up. Of course, there is also the in-between area. This is where attitude is not pessimistic but not overly optimistic, either.
Still, learning how to boost your positivity quotient can be instrumental in helping you work toward goals. It always helps to talk with others who have learned to adopt a more positive attitude. Who knows, some of what they have to say may make sense to you. At the very least, you’ll have a place to begin.
Your Life Is Changed Now
Things may not have worked out how you had hoped. But consider how different your life is now and how much you’ve changed. It will only get better from here. Commit to continuing your work, create realistic goals, and give yourself time to achieve them.
In short, a positive attitude helps you achieve your goals. Even if you experience frustration, your positive attitude helps mitigate it and motivates you to get back to work on what matters.
Furthermore, the more positive you are, the easier it is to remain positive despite challenges and difficulties. This is essential to get past frustration and recommit to goals.
Network with Others
Whether it is a business networking organization, social gathering, or neighborhood group, networking with others offers value. When you are frustrated, isn’t it helpful to be with others who know what you are experiencing? Even more importantly, there’s value in learning tips from others on overcoming frustration and getting back to working on their goals.
Be Willing to Try New Approaches to Overcome Frustration
Just because you haven’t achieved a specific goal does not mean you will remain that way. The test is how willing you are to keep experimenting and seeking novel approaches to solving current challenges.
Look Past Playing It Safe
People want safe solutions. They don’t want to rock the boat and are afraid to try something new. While this is understandable and common, always playing it safe may mean missing powerful, practical solutions.
It can be challenging to see past a current situation and envision how another approach may turn out. In a way, life is like a puzzle with constantly rotating pieces or a maze with many switchbacks. But everyone can get better at overcoming frustration with time, dedication, commitment, and practice. Being curious is also helpful: You can train yourself to do this.
What to Do
Identify alternative approaches when you decide upon an action or plan to achieve your goal. Why is this important? If your plan falls short, you will have something to fall back on and feel more secure and self-confident, knowing you have alternatives.
- The trial-and-error approach is a proven method to make progress. You try something. It works. You file this piece of information away so that you can use this approach again when needed.
- Or you try something, and it doesn’t work. Then, you need to figure out why it didn’t and attempt to determine what would make it work better.
- However, you may need to discard what you did or put it aside and take a different approach.
- By utilizing what works, modifying what doesn’t, and trying something new, you will add to your toolkit for overcoming frustration and making substantial progress toward your goals.
Evaluate What You Have Accomplished
Looking over your abilities and accomplishments can be a real revelation. Everyone needs success to motivate them.
- Another reason to review your accomplishments to date: to evaluate your good efforts.
- This may be especially helpful when brainstorming a new problem, challenge, or opportunity.
- A supply of practical strategies that work in different situations will increase your self-confidence and self-esteem when tackling something new.
It is also important to remind yourself that you have what it takes to get the job done despite occasional frustration. Look over what you have accomplished and give yourself credit. Then, get back to working on your goals, feeling a little more upbeat about your prospects for success.
Overcoming Frustration: Try Again
Managing frustration that gets in the way of your goals will be a personal and unique approach. The only way to achieve what you desire is to continue to work at it, even if this means trying again.
Is the effort worth it? Only you can answer that, but if your commitment is strong, you will do everything possible to continue.
- This means regularly revising your goals, adding new ones, and modifying or eliminating those that no longer apply.
- It also means striving to learn something new daily, applying what you know to new situations, networking to interact with others who may have promising ideas on how to best deal with recurring problems, and maintaining a positive attitude.
This is your life. You want it to be as happy, healthy, productive, and fulfilling as possible. Therefore, when you are frustrated by your inability to reach or complete your goals, you must try again. You will eventually achieve your goal or decide another takes precedence.
