Don't Pull up the Seeds When You've Just Sown Them.
Why is it that 95% of people who set themselves goals fail to reach them? In one word: impatience.The most important and difficult stage of goal-building is the immediate stage after you set your goals. In the first stage, there’s a brief blip of euphoria. But this soon passes and then you hit the arid plateau of learning. It’s in this phase that most people lose their way and give up.
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1. Have Plenty of
Motivation Reminders
One of the cruel tricks that life plays on
us is to make goal-setting easy and goal-building hard. This is no more true
than in the opening phases of working towards a new goal. When we choose a new
goal that seems within our reach, we are full of excitement and anticipation.
It’s like the start of a marathon when everyone cheers us over the start line.
But the cheers soon become a distant memory when we move into the second phase,
the hard slog. It’s in this phase that we need to have a ready supply of
motivation reminders to keep us going. Here’s one I often use. It’s from Ray
Kroc, founder of the global restaurant chain McDonald’s. Kroc was an amazing
entrepreneur. He says that it is in the early stages of working towards a new
goal that you learn the most: “When you’re green, you grow. When you’re ripe,
you rot.”
2. Be a Fly, Not A Bee
The
chief problem with the early stages of goal-building is that you can never be
sure of the right way forward, particularly if you are breaking new ground. You
try something and it doesn’t work. You try again and it doesn’t work again. And
again.And again. That’s tough. But it’s essential. Because you’re learning.
Karl Weick says that in this situation it is much better to be a fly than a
bee. When you place a fly and a bee in an upturned jam jar, the bee will head
straight for the light and repeatedly buzz against the bottom of the glass. The
fly on the other hand will dive frantically around the jar exploring every
corner until he finds a way out. That’s the example to follow when you want to
succeed: be a fly, not a bee.
3.
Accept the Struggle
Those who are eager to succeed often treat the second phase
of goal-building as an unnecessary waste of time. They would prefer to skip it
and jump to the next phase of success. But this is to misunderstand the whole
point of the second phase. It’s there to toughen you up. You may have heard the
story of “The Man and the Butterfly” about the man who saw a butterfly
struggling to emerge from its cocoon. To help it out, the man cut a bigger hole
in the cocoon and pulled the butterfly through. However, instead of flying
away, the butterfly was unable to fly. Its body was too swollen. What the man
did not understand was that the butterfly’s struggle to emerge through the hole
forces fluid from its body to its wings and thus makes them strong and ready to
carry its weight. Like the butterfly, we need to struggle to succeed.
4.
Be Objective
In stage two of goal-building, it’s valuable to stand back
and distance ourselves from what’s going on. We need to be tripeds not bipeds.
Bipeds are people who see only themselves and others. Risk-taking is a
do-or-die undertaking. Progress is either a triumph or disaster. Life is black
and white, winning or losing. Tripeds, on the other hand, can distance
themselves from their situation by finding a third position where they can
observe things with objectivity. Life isn’t either-or any more. It has depth,
colour, and many angles.
5. Don’t Judge Yourself
Our win-lose culture puts great pressure on us to consider
ourselves at any moment in life as either winners or losers. This means that
failure is a bad thing and winning is everything. One of the most quoted
expressions in our modern culture is: “Failure is not an option”. But this is
to misunderstand the real nature of success. We need to fail in order to
succeed. And we need to fail big-time in order to succeed big-time. Practically
every successful entrepreneur, from Thomas Edison to Walt Disney, experienced
failure many times over. But they didn’t judge themselves. They interpreted
failure as “not succeeding yet” and saw it as just one more step on the road to
success.
6. Manage Your Morale
Of course, it’s not always much fun to be stuck in the hard
slog phase of goal-building. Nobody’s cheering any more. You have nothing to
show for your efforts. And the dream still feels as far away as ever. That’s
when you have to manage your morale. That means managing your stress, keeping
things light, and working on the things you can’t see: your thinking patterns,
your emotions, and your spirit. And, like the fluid in the butterfly, these may
just be the things that will make you fly. I can say: “I am terribly frightened
and fear is terrible and it makes me uncomfortable, so I won’t do it.” Or I
could say: “Get used to being uncomfortable.” It is uncomfortable doing
something risky. But so what? Do you want to stagnate and just be comfortable?”
(Barbra Streisand)
We human beings are very similar to the plant world. We
grow best when we work with Nature and time. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to
achieve your goals. If you hold on with faith, certainty, and determination,
you’ll get there in due course when the time is right.
Recommend To Read: How To Change Limiting Beliefs
Recommend To Read: How To Change Limiting Beliefs
About the author
Eric Garner runs
ManageTrainLearn.com, the site with the biggest and most original range of
management training materials on the
Internet.
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