Where the Rubber Meets the Road

“Endure and persist; this pain will turn to good by and by.”

— Ovid

There are many personal qualities that are important contributors to long-term success, but I’ve been writing about some of the most powerful ones over the last few weeks.  Along with focus and creativity, persistence is absolutely necessary if you’re to keep yourself moving ever forward in life toward greater mastery of your chosen subject matter.  Life has a way of surprising us with all manner of challenges no matter how well we plan.  It’s easy to become discouraged by the constant disruptions and the necessary adjustments those challenges call upon us to make.  In order to hang in there long enough to get where you want to go, you’ll need to be able to fire up your persistence day in and day out, almost no matter what may be happening around you.  Yes, I know, that’s a tall order!  I can hear some of you groaning already—this is starting to sound very un-fun.

And yet, what if you could find ways to maintain a calm sense of balance in the midst of chaos?  What if you knew how to feed your confidence throughout challenge so that persistence didn’t seem like such a Herculean effort?  These are just skills that can be learned, like any other.  While some people will be more naturally gifted than others in any area, almost everyone can become at least functional in most skill sets.  If you’re someone whose motivation gets knocked off course often, such that you’re often starting and stopping your efforts on things that really matter to you, here are some things to try on the road to becoming unstoppable. 

·      Remember the importance of focus?  You’ll need to apply it to keep reminding yourself that persistence is a skill, not some magical quality that you weren’t born with, so why bother?  Some people were taught the skills that feed persistence early, and some need to learn them later, but you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to learn them before you can effectively build them.

·      You’ll also need to focus on what’s important to you consistently.  Every day.  Find ways to do this that appeal to you.  It’s good to make this fun, so indulge yourself!  If you like, write reminders to yourself on bright sticky notes and scatter them around where you’ll see them throughout the day, or make a recording of yourself repeating your top priorities and play it back in the car, or take a few minutes before you get out of bed and before you go to sleep at night to go over them in your mind and enjoy how they express the truth of you.  There can be great joy in just repeating your most important values to yourself often.  You might be surprised how enjoyable and inspiring this becomes.

·      Practice reviewing your priorities before making decisions throughout your day.  When you get into the habit of making sure that what’s most important to you is at least considered in your smallest decisions, you reinforce your ability to strategize with them always in mind.  When the larger, more pivotal decisions come up, it will be easier to do the same, and you’ll become brilliant at making decisions that serve your values and goals.

·      Keep a journal on decisions you made and how well they support your goals.  This is an excellent way to give yourself credit for and celebrate good decisions, as well as notice decisions that you made in a hurry, forgetting to think through what would really be best for you and everyone else before charging ahead.  If you don’t take time to frequently review what’s happening in your life, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns and find that you’re getting nowhere.  If you keep an eye on things, you have opportunities to do better every day, and you’ll progress much more quickly.

·      Sometimes, you will have a bad day.  You will need the love and support of at least a few people who you can count on to care about you no matter what.  Practice reaching out to them when things aren’t terrible just to talk through a choice or share a win or a concern.  This will make it more natural and easy for you to ask for attention when you really need it.  Everyone needs support sometimes, and being reminded that someone else cares about you and believes in you helps restore your courage and keep you in the game.

·      Manage your mind and your emotions.  This cannot be said enough.  Your mind will have a tendency to judge you, and others, and spiral into negativity.  If you want to build persistence, you must gain the ability to arrest this cycle and bring your mind back to a neutral state at least, and practice more resourceful thinking.  You don’t have to pretend that everything is always rosy, but if you’re always indulging in negativity, there’s no way you’re going to reach your goals—and if you did by some stroke of luck, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy them.  Your emotions, in the moment at least, proceed from your thinking.  There are also probably a bunch stuck in your system from previous events and thinking.  For clearing those, the best technique I’ve ever found is EFT/Tapping, and it’s easy and free to do, so if you haven’t taken the time yet, learn the basics and try it!  It’s so much easier to make good decisions when you’re not being overwhelmed with outdated mental and emotional habits left over from the past.

·      Be stubborn.  Every two-year-old knows how to do this like a champ.  If you’ve forgotten how, channel your inner two-year-old and stamp your feet and yell, “No!  No, no NO!  I want _______!” at the top of your lungs every once in a while.  Jump up and down for added effect.  In addition to being hilarious and getting your blood pumping, this can reconnect you with your most basic desires and your conviction that you deserve to get them.  Small children don’t spend time worrying about whether it’s prudent to want a pet unicorn, they just go ahead and want it.  When you really connect with your desires, a lot of energy becomes available to you that you can use to take action.  Your zest for life resurfaces.  You can’t achieve goals if you’re always exhausted and don’t remember what all the effort is for.  You have to let yourself want things in order to feel fully alive.  Even if they seem impossible, your desires have important messages for you, and help you to keep finding your direction in the face of adversity.

A few caveats:

·      Sometimes persistence is not the right tool for the job.  If you’re persisting but continually missing the mark, it may be time for a new strategy and some course correction.  Mindless persistence can end up looking a lot like reckless stupidity.  You want to stay open to learning new things, and benefiting from outside perspectives.

·      There will always be moments in any life when it’s time to take a break, either just for vacation, to rest and recharge, or because you’re going through a major transition of some sort—but when you can decide when to take time rather than always struggling to recover enough to get back on the horse, that’s a better place to be. 

·      Each of us has things we’re just really, really not suited for, in addition to things we’re great at.  If you’ve applied yourself enough to gain some ability, but still loathe and get bogged down by a certain activity, it’s wise to partner with someone who is good at it, or find other ways to work around doing it. 

·      If you’re someone who is motivated by joining with others in some way, then by all means find a buddy who can help you keep at it on a daily basis, or pay a coach to help you stay focused on your goals and the actions you need to take to keep growing.  Most people enjoy effort more if they can share accomplishments with others who cheer them on and appreciate their progress.  Relationships make life, and our successes, more meaningful and more fun.  Look, we brought it back around to fun!  And we should.  Why be so serious when we can build fun into all of our days with just the intention to do so?  Balance means playing as well as we work, because play helps us to relax, de-stress, and regain creativity.

Maintaining persistence is a lifelong pursuit, like maintaining good health.  We’re never done.  But if you don’t ever get around to investing time and effort into creating basic habits that will keep you going, you can’t expect to live the kind of life you want.  Start small if persistence is hard for you, but start!  You can do this.

Onward and Upward

“The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist, the more likely your success.”

— Jack Canfield

Just keep going.  This is one of the most important principles I know of in the grand scheme of creating a successful life.  You don’t have to always be running—you can walk, skip, hop or dance—and it’s ok to take a breather now and then when you need it.  But if you can build the habit of just doing what you can to move forward a little bit every day, your progress toward what you want will be much faster than if you tend to exhaust yourself and drop out, or reconsider everything when you don’t get immediate results. 

In such a fast-paced world, one in which we’ve been shown that everyone can become an “overnight” success by just getting on a reality T.V. show, our expectations may have become a bit unrealistic.  For most people, success is the result of years of effort, which invariable include lots of ups and downs.  Even those who seem to have gotten a big, lucky break have usually spent plenty of unglamorous time preparing and wondering at times if they’d ever get anywhere.  Just like the rest of us!

I would suggest that this time of uncertainty and constant application yields precious abilities, even when it seems like nothing is happening.  When we keep going despite resistance, worry, boredom, and annoyance, we’re building a habit of focus and healthy stubbornness that can serve us throughout life.  Of course, I’m not implying that we should be so stubborn that we never consider our results and adjust course, or listen to the constructive feedback of others.  I am in favor or each person dancing to their own drummer, though; you must ultimately be the one who decides what is right for you, and sometimes even the most well-intentioned advice must be ignored if it doesn’t seem right to you and for you.  Some of the people who have invented the most astonishing things throughout history have been told over and over that creating what they saw in their mind’s eye was impossible. They kept going and perfected those things anyway.  Healthy stubbornness in action!

There are many ways to keep yourself going when it’s difficult and uncomfortable to do so.  I suggest broadening your tool set so that you have a better chance of staying in the game when the going gets frustrating.  For example:

·      Figure out what motivates you and roll with it.  Are you someone whose abilities wake up when you’re moving toward something good, or working to outrun something you fear?  Most of us respond somewhat to both, but you may find that one or the other is more effective for you.  If you like to imagine moving toward something you want, remind yourself at least once a day what you’re working toward by imagining it vividly—preferably numerous times per day.  This will bring you little surges of energy and the ability to recommit to your task every time you do it.  You can also give yourself a little pep talk here and there and remind yourself of the progress you’ve made.  If you get fired up when you imagine moving away from something bad, you can imagine something like that instead—see, hear, and feel people talking about how you failed and they knew you’d never amount to anything, etc.  For most people, far more repetitions of the positive style of motivation is best, but throwing in a vision of what you definitely don’t want can sometimes add some spice to the mix.

·      Take care of your physical needs without fail.  Don’t skip meals, but keep them healthy.  Get regular exercise, which builds energy and helps manage stress and lift your moods, and stretch your muscles to stay limber.  Get at least seven hours of sleep per night.  Brush and floss.  You get the picture.

·      Tell only the people you know you can trust to be supportive about your big goals.  The last thing you need is a lot of negativity from people who think small, or are threatened by your unique vision. 

·      Commit to being a lifelong learner.  No one starts off as an expert.  We all build expertise in the areas we choose over time, and it never happens overnight.  You don’t have to keep up with all information all the time, but you do need to keep up with your chosen field of interest, and again, it’s a fast-paced world out there.  This will take some time and attention always if you want to be good at what you do, but it will also keep exposing you to the brilliance of others, which is inspiring.

·      Find ways to blow off steam when you hit road blocks.  Do or watch something that makes you laugh yourself silly.  Spend time with friends.  Volunteer for a worthy cause and get your mind off your own troubles.  Spend some time on a hobby that just makes you feel good.  Read biographies of successful people, who I guarantee went through hard times before they became famous and respected for their contributions.  Write out your woes in a journal.  Go outside and enjoy the natural world.

·      Be willing to rethink your strategy as you try things and learn from your experiences.  Consult others who have done something similar for advice and a change of perspective.

·      If you crash and burn or fall off the wagon in some way, know that everyone experiences failure sometimes, and we often learn far more from these episodes than from we do from smooth sailing.  Failures and mistakes may feel terrible when they’re happening, but they are not the end unless we decide they are.  If you’re still alive, there’s still more left within you.

·      Remind yourself that what you have to give is unique and important.  Even if it’s not yet ready or not yet connecting with an audience or customers, someone out there needs and is waiting for what you have to offer.

For some people, succeeding to a level that feels satisfying takes far longer than they ever hoped or imagined.  If this is you, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—this is a very common human experience.  We can’t always know beforehand exactly what will get us to our destination.  Just keep taking a step forward every time you can, keep learning, and above all, just keep going.