An old friend that I haven't seen in years was telling me over the phone a few weeks back: "I envy people who can pick any goal they want, go after it with gusto, and achieve it with all the grace and ease of a ballerina. "
Nicely put. Yet, I only play with duality. My belief is that we all reach our goals depending on the approach we take.
👉 Another one told me a few days ago that being in Hive as a newbie is overwhelming because her posts barely get noticed and she is so unmotivated after writing and not receiving the visibility or feedback she would want.
Well, I tell you what I told them both: if you’re more into sports analogies, you could say they achieve their goals like an unstoppable quarterback making their way through the defense and getting the ball right where it needs to go.
No matter which analogy you pick...
The point is that I suspect there is a limited number of people like that in the world, who are easily achievers and winners all their life.
For the rest of us, if we want to achieve our goals in business, our jobs, our relationships, and our health, or anything else, we need to pick the right approach.
But who knows which is the right approach? We keep on trying our best each time.
There’s no shortage of personal development gurus and articles that will tell you what to do. Unfortunately, not everything they tell you to do even makes sense.
Take the trend of “microdosing” your actions towards your goals.
If you haven’t heard of it, it basically means you start day #1 with doing like 5 minutes of work, just to accustom yourself used to it. Next, you do 5 more minutes.
And so on.
The idea is that once you’ve spent a week doing this, you’ve started to build a habit, and therefore it’s going to be way easier to increase to spending 10 minutes daily the next week working on your goal, and you’ll do it more and more with each week.
It’s an idea that makes sense when you read it.
Do you know what the issue is, though?
During the first two weeks, you’ve just worked 5 minutes for 7 days on week one, and 10 minutes for 7 days on week two. Which makes it a grand total of 105 minutes… less than two hours in 2 weeks.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard of all that many goals that can be achieved at that pace. In business, if anything, your competition will just outwork you, and it will matter little if you’ve built a habit or not.
Even bigger issue?
You will see a snail's progress.
And you’ll be discouraged. And quit.
But, it isn't your fault. To be motivated, we have to see real results - instead of just being able to mark a box that says “I worked for 5 minutes on my goals today”.
So what's a better approach?
Do it the hard way. Hard doesn't have to be stressful. It can imply passion, creativity, a few intense hours of testing it, instead of a whole day.
Use the TOTE Model from NLP: Test-Operate-Test-Exit. I've written about it before, but I'll be happy to tell you more AFTER you give it a simple Google search ;)
Take an idea and have at it with all your might. Swing for the fences. Day #1, day #2, day #3. Do it for a week.
In a week, you’ll see noticeable improvements. You’ll still build a habit… but you will be less discouraged because there are no results. If you go at it hard… the results will come.
The biggest challenge is not to burn yourself out doing this.
This is the thing. If you work hard like this, the moments you rest will be that much better and more refreshing and rewarding because you’ll experience a completely different level of relaxation that comes with knowing you’ve created many different results for yourself.
Would you like that?
What’s the one area in your life that could be most improved by this approach?
Ideas I am inserting in my 👇👇👇
