Going for it is the worst thing you could do.
Going for it isn’t the secret.
One of the reasons that we struggle to know what we want and get what we want is our shame at the train of past failures we drag behind us. We’ve tried it before and it didn’t work. Not knowing and not getting becomes a bad habit formed by relentless practice. We’ve practiced being unable to work out what we want clearly enough and we have also practiced not getting what we think we have been clear about.
Let’s look at the anatomy of this repeated failure by first looking at the anatomy of a successful decision.
A successful decision involves three stages – Decide / Act /Get. First we make a clear and unambiguous decision, we take the appropriate action and we get the result we wanted. More than that though, we also notice that we have got the result and that underscores our ability to repeat this in the future.
Now let’s look at the anatomy of failure.
First we lunge half heartedly at a decision, it’s not clear enough or it’s too ambitious or it’s not even our decision. Perhaps we are copying someone else or have let ourselves be unduly influenced by others. As the decision is poor so our actions are poor, half hearted and ineffective. We notice only too clearly that we have not got what we wanted and this reinforces our conviction that we are not the kind of person who can get what we want, that such things are the preserve of a special club that we not a member of.
Under these circumstances ‘going for it’ is probably the worst advice you could follow. Trying to screw up your motivation, creating a big vision, finding a stretch goal are all bits of useless advice I’ve seen offered to people to change their lives. Unfortunately, this way lies more failure.
So what can you do? The most effective answer is to rehearse the pattern of success using small decisions and easy actions until you eradicate the habit of failure. Pick small decisions that are yours and you can be clear about, take the actions, notice when you get the result. Repeat. Get good at becoming the kind of person who can decide something, act on it and get the result.
Going for it won’t work. What will work is taking enough small steps that you learn to trust yourself again. After all, that’s how you learned to walk so it seems like it might be a successful strategy for learning to know and achieve what you want. When you say “Yes” it means “Yes”. When you say you are going to do it then it is as good as done.
Learn more about how to become this kind of person…
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