Stress & Anxiety: The Hidden Barriers to Your Goals

Have you ever set yourself a goal, said to yourself ‘this is it, I’m doing this’, gotten the rush of excitement….and then found yourself stuck, procrastinating and doubting yourself? This is the time when many people assume that the obstacles are a lack of time, opportunities or skills but often, stress and anxiety play a much bigger role than you realise.

Stress creates mental fog, making it hard to approach your goals objectively while anxiety fuels self-doubt and lets all potential negative scenarios come bubbling to the surface to look and feel like truth. Together they can keep you frozen in place, stuck in the belief that you can’t get to where you want to be.

What if your biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of skills or inconvenient circumstances – but your stress response?

The mind is an incredible thing, everything that you have known, learnt and experienced gets stored there – and strategies are created there to protect you from threat. That includes perceived threats, such as change and the unknown.

Change is a frightening concept and we tend to resist it where possible, even when the change could be a move from definite dissatisfaction or even unhappiness, to potential improvement. Stress and anxiety work to keep you in place rather than step out of your comfort zone, thereby effectively blocking you from moving forward. Here are a few of the ways that stress and anxiety could be blocking you;

The Brain’s Response to Stress

The brain can go into particular default modes when faced with change, uncertainty or high expectation. These things can be perceived as threatening and you can find yourself shifting into survival mode, like fight, flight or freeze.

You can lose track of your goals as you get caught up in all the minute details which makes it harder to think clearly, focus or make confident decisions. This reaction makes any task, however big or small, seem overwhelming. This is because you’re unable to focus on that one task – you’re feeling pulled by everything at once. This leads to you not getting started at all.

Paralysis by Overthinking

Overthinking is recognised as a classic symptom of anxiety and it can lead you to a state of mental and emotional paralysis as you ask yourself ‘what if….?’ All the potential negative outcomes rise into your thoughts and not once does it get balanced with possible wins, successes and achievements. 'What if I fail?' 'What if I make a wrong choice?' 'What if I’m not good enough?' Many of us have asked ourselves these questions and they help us to hide away from our goals and never really try for them. These questions can easily become assumptions and then predictions. They go from being questions to statements. 'What if I’m not good enough' becomes 'I’m not good enough' and 'what if I fail' becomes 'I’ll fail.'

Lack of Energy & Motivation

Chronic stress drains your mental and physical energy which makes even the smaller everyday tasks feel exhausting. How can you move forward towards your goals if you can only just about keep up with what’s currently going on for you?

Keeping focus can be a real challenge but an important aspect of this is that you can find yourself procrastinating or avoiding what you need to do altogether. These behaviours keep you stuck. Procrastination can disguise itself as getting prepared for action. That might look like perfectionism or constantly telling yourself that you’ll do it when…except ‘when’ never arrives.

Stress induced fatigue reduces motivation which deeply impacts your ability to overcome challenges.

Self-Sabotage

Fear of failure very often leads to avoidance behaviours like procrastination and perfectionism (again), or making excuses. These are methods of self deception, as you’re telling yourself that you will while giving yourself every ‘reason’ not to.

Negative self talk is something many of us have had to deal with at one time or another. What we tell ourselves is important. Think about when you’ve told yourself how you can’t do things, how clumsy you are or socially awkward. How did that feel? Not great, right? Straight away there’s the emotional link to your negative self talk. How do you behave once you’re feeling down? Low energy, slumped shoulders, head down perhaps. It’s all connected.

Self sabotage can easily become a cycle that repeats itself and with each repeat, the frustration and negativity reinforces the belief that success is beyond your reach. The belief becomes perceived as a fact.

All of that sounds a bit grim but here’s the good news; you can break through stress and anxiety, and coaching can help. Coaching offers a wide range of supportive tools to help you get back on track and overcome the blocks that hold you in place. Let’s have a look at some of the ways that coaching can help;

Clarity & Perspective

A coach can help you to step back from the stress and see the bigger picture. Being able to change you perspective and view the situation from another angle effective takes you out of the storm so you can approach your situation with more objectivity.

A coach will ask you the questions that help you to get introspective. This will allow you to identify what’s really holding you back so that you can refocus on your goals.

Being in an environment where you can explore your goals, your values and your needs, you can gain a new sense of direction instead of feeling lost in the overwhelm. With that sense of direction you and your coach can put together a structured plan which will let you move forward at a consistent pace.

Mindset Shifts

Coaching helps you to reframe limiting beliefs and self doubt into empowering thoughts. Remember when we looked at negative self talk? This is where coaching can step in. Instead of those ‘what if’ questions/statements pulling you down, you learn to rise above them and answer them from a place of self belief and empowerment. What if I’m not good enough. What does that mean? That you don’t have the skills? You can learn them. I don’t know how to start? You can find out. What if I fail? The majority of the things we do now took a fair amount of failure before becoming successful. We failed multiple times before we learned how to walk, to tie our shoelaces, to get a job. Every time we fail, we learn so reframing what failure is and using it as a growth mechanism can help you through that anxiety.

Accountability & Support

Stress and anxiety have deepest impact when you’re isolated. Having a coach means that you’re not facing your struggles alone. It’s important that you feel you can be honest with your coach and having the safety to talk about your goals without the fear of being judged is a powerful factor.

One of the big obstacles to creating a lasting change or getting to a goal is accountability. Working with a coach means that you have regular check-ins which increases motivation and helps to keep you on track.

A coach can give you constructive feedback – note that this is NOT criticism. Your coach wants you to succeed and feedback is designed to look at what’s working and what might not be going so well so you can move forward. You’ll also get a lot of encouragement and both of these will help you to move through moments of doubt.

Practical Strategies

Coaching offers guidance on practical techniques to support you when you find stress and anxiety holding you back. These include stress management practices like mindfulness, breathing exercises and reframing strategies.

You’ll also learn about structured goal setting methods to handle the feelings over overwhelm that are so common with stress and anxiety. This means that you’ll break down your goals into smaller, manageable steps. It can be a common misconception that in order to achieve something, you need to take great leaps forward. In reality, it’s far better to take consistent small steps than to leap, get overwhelmed and then stop. Remember that small, consistent steps lead to big change over time.

Is stress or anxiety keeping you from moving forward? If so, I invite you to take a small stress free step today; reach out and book a free discovery call with me. Find out for yourself how coaching could help you to get moving towards your goals.