I’ve been talking a lot lately about ways we sabotage our goals. If you haven’t yet seen my post on LinkedIn, please watch it here. It hit a chord with thousands of professionals. Why? Because we spend an awful lot of time strategizing our goals and dreams, but very little energy contemplating the forces that sabotage those dreams.
True increased performance comes from pushing through pain and discomfort, not simply from vowing to change. High achievers learn to move past annoyances and push through pain. Think of it this way. Like an athlete needs to move through pain to make her muscles stronger, we must move through emotional, psychological and spiritual pain to become wiser and more successful.
One of the reasons less than ten percent of people never reach their goals is because the pain of rejection, uncertainty, overwhelm and discomfort becomes unbearable.
You will be rejected.
You will face ridicule.
You will feel resistance at every level.
Progress hurts.
Last year, I published my first book after three years of rejection, signed on new clients from five different verticals and starred in a documentary film produced by the largest CRM company on the planet. Was it painful at times? You betcha. Was it worth it?
The best year of my life.
So, if you’re determined to manifest something different this year, or what we now call “crushing it,” you need to push to crush. And I don’t mean the kind of pushing where you ignore your family and friends. Life and work aren’t two adversaries battling for our limited attention.
In fact, the opposite is true. When we have meaningful, purposeful work, we radiate optimism and that optimism will fuel happiness and productivity in every area of our life.
At the end of 2018, when you look back, your success is going to be the result of how much you pushed through the pain. The pain of rejection, the pain of uncertainly, the pain of restraint, the pain of a bruised ego and the agony of failure.
My Advice? Do These Three Things:
#1: Do That Which You’re Most Afraid Of.
The greater the resistance the harder you must push through. One of my favorite books is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The major theme is that when attempting any worthwhile endeavor—anything you’d love to accomplish—you will encounter resistance.
It’s often easier not to try than to risk failure. What separates professionals from everyone else is that even though they are fearful of something, they never resist trying everything. They do whatever it takes. “Resistance is directly proportional to love,” writes Pressfield. “If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is there’s tremendous love there, too. The more Resistance you feel, the more important your un-manifested goal, enterprise/project is to you.”
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#2: When a Project Seems Too Big, Break it Down.
Make the large things small, the smaller things smaller and complete one next step right now. Assign redundant tasks to a helper. Delegate. I started in sales in my twenties well before the Internet, and well before the first CRM. I learned that by hiring an assistant to book calls for me, I could make an extra $90 per hour by focusing the majority of my time talking directly to buyers. What can you delegate?
#3: When You Lose the Deal, don’t Lose the Lesson.
We don’t learn from failure by beating ourselves up and turning it into a catastrophe, we learn from failure by facing it and gleaning lessons from it. Isolate what happened. Separate what just happened and what could happen in the future, and for goodness sakes don’t turn it into a refrain of “I’m a failure, my life is terrible and I always screw up.”
You don’t have to push yourself to a new level, every day, but you do have to push yourself. You have to step beyond the boundaries and the pain of your last year to achieve your best year.
Happy 2018!