Achieving Personal Goals

I was standing in line at our favorite discount superstore, and overheard two women talking about something one of them had done (couldn’t tell what it was). She was recounting how stupid she had been, and how it was typical. “I’m always doing that, I’m such an idiot”, she said.

Now fast-forward to last night. I was at my local Toastmasters club meeting, and one of our members gave a speech on a similar topic in which his daughter came home from a soccer tryout disappointed, and was assessing her chances. “I’m not as good as the other girls, I don’t think I’ll be able to make the team. I’m just not very good”.

Do You Let Others Talk To You Like That?

Now take either of those messages, but suppose someone else said that to you. “You’re such an idiot, you’re always doing that.” “You’re just not as good as the rest of them, you might as well quit and go home.” For most of us, them’s fightin’ words. Yet we say that to ourselves!!??

“I’m not as successful as they are.”
“I’m not as pretty as she is.”
“I’m fat.”
“I’m no good at this.”
“How can I be so stupid?”

What’s worse is that these internal conversations are generally very subtle, so “under the radar” that we hardly notice them. But make no mistake, they’re there, and probably more often than you might think. They can be indicators of our self-esteem, which has an important impact on our ability to achieve our dreams.

Is That Cursing?

Back to last nights speech. The speaker’s response to his daughter was “I don’t want to hear you cursing like that”. Apparently his daughter, like those of us in the audience, paused for a moment to recall what she’d said and tried to remember where the inadvertent curse word slipped out. “But dad”, she replied, “I didn’t curse”.

“Oh yes you did. You cursed yourself and said things I would never let someone else say to you.” In that moment, I saw people starting to realize what he was talking about, and that he was right.

There is no shortage of evidence that self-depreciation gets in the way of all kinds of personal development and progress (not to mention happiness), and I dare say it makes achievement much harder when you you’ve got a conversation going that says “aha – you screwed up again, this will never work”. Developing positive self-esteem is a personal challenge, but it’s an important part of being happy, and helps us be ourselves, and believe that we are able to prevail in life.

Low self-esteem, which may be evidenced by self-depreciation, is a belief that we’re not good enough to deal with the things that may come our way. It’s poison to our mind, and is related to a variety of difficult mental and emotional problems, including a belief that we can’t achieve our goals.

For more on self-esteem, read this page about a widely used scale for measuring self-esteem.

In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz breaks the problem of low self-esteem and self-deprecating internal messages into an easy analogy: Which channel are you tuning into? We each have 2 channels that play in our heads: one positive, and the other negative. If this is a problem for you, the next time you catch yourself tuned into The Negative Channel, switch to The Positive Channel. Make a conscious effort to begin playing back the successes you’ve had, the things you’ve done right and the times you tackled a challenge, persevered thru the difficulties and prevailed. We’ve all had them, but for whatever reason we don’t give them enough awareness.

The Challenge

I’m not naive enough to think this is an easy issue to deal with. In the same way any habit is formed slowly over time, un-learning it must be done with deliberate, consistent effort over time.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. — Henry David Thoreau

That’s the point. If this “cursing” is a mental habit that’s interfering with achieving your goals, start creating that new pathway, start building over and over those new neural pathways in the mind, to replace the old, negative ones. It’s not magic, but it takes consistent attention and awareness.

Change The Channel

I realize that this post won’t resonate with everyone – some people don’t have this issue to deal with. For those who do, though, I hope it helps raise to your consciousness just a little to the problem and encourages you to change the channel and deal with it so it doesn’t derail your opportunity to succeed.

So … quit talking to yourself in a way that you’d never tolerate if it were coming from someone else. Tune to The Positive Channel as a way to nurture the kind of attitude that will HELP your goal seeking efforts, not stymie them.

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I started off the day last Wednesday with a clear plan. I’d done my daily agenda and knew what I needed to get done. Then it happened – real world “stuff” started to pop up.

The phone rang, someone walked up, an urgent email from a business user….. Before I knew it, I was off plan and had allowed myself to get pulled into several seemingly simple, quick tasks that took longer than expected (imagine that?) and before I knew it I was into the afternoon.

Which left me thinking “uh, where am I working now?”, meaning which quadrant of Stephen Covey’s 4 quadrant time management model had I stumbled into, and how quickly could I get myself back out!

If you’re not familiar with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the key time management strategies it offers is this “4 Quadrant Model”. This model tells us that the events of the day generally tend to fall into one of these 4 areas:

The objective, you see, is to deal with those issues that arise in the realm of Important and Urgent, but to move as quickly as possible to Important and Not Urgent, because that is where the true progress is made.

I know this, I believe it, and yet nearly every day I find myself drifting into Urgent but Not Important (faux-crisis), and having to pull myself back to the Important side. The point is this: It’s a never ending struggle, worse some days than others, but we have to realize that the gravity of life will pull us into unimportant things all the time that sound urgent, but really aren’t. It’s our job to keep our awareness on high alert, so we can stay on the Important side of the grid. That’s where we get the meaningful things done, the things that ultimately make our lives better.

You probably already know most of this, but it’s such a good topic and since it seems I have to relearn it about once a month, that I thought I’d post about it anyway. Sometimes the “Unimportant” is the easiest stuff to do, and the Urgent always demands our attention like a nagging (kid/husband/wife/??) and that’s why we drift toward it. Many times these tasks are quick, rewarding and always around. But we need to stay vigilant – progress comes when we decide what’s Important and where we should be spending our time – not someone else.

Now if I can just get this disgusting file folder organized, I’ll finally be able to get back to finishing that plan for world peace.

Next post: “That’s Crazy Talk!”

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Everybody’s in such a rush these days, no time to stop and smell the roses. Life just moves too fast. Do you agree with this?
 
Me too, but I think there should be a follow-on comment … there’s a time and a place for everything.   No question we should take time each week to relax, decompress and enjoy all the simple pleasures life has to offer.
 
But …. at least for me, there is also satisfaction from “climbing the hill”. Doesn’t really matter which hill, it’s just that having a sense of purpose, a meaningful reason to get going each day that adds a measure of satisfaction to life. Retirement – no thanks. But I do want to spend my time doing the things that are important to me.
 
So from here, the next step is to acknowledge that the more action we take, the more we get done.
 
So if I really want to be as productive with my time as possible, I need to be a good steward of that time, i.e. use it wisely, not waste it, and realize it’s my most scarce resource.
 
Still with me? OK, but careful because the water starts to get deeper now.
 
If I really want to maximize my time, it’s helpful to live my day with a sense of urgency. Not urgency as in panic, but urgency in the sense that I’m moving briskly from task to task, and working with concentration and focus at all times.
 
As an example, the day before going on vacation we’re generally very focused because we have a list of things that we know we need to get done. That’s working with a sense of urgency. Notice I didn’t say “sense of panic” – don’t want that. But what if we worked with that kind of focus and urgency, during our working hours, every day?
 
That’s why deadlines are necessary, and encouraged here when you build your goal Action Plan.
 
I can hear some people thinking “geez, that sounds hard, stressful”, but I don’t agree. A sense of urgency is nothing more than a sense of focused purpose, which precludes spending time doing on the trivial when I can be doing the important. It’s not about panic, it’s about having purpose, eliminating distractions and staying focused. Keeping the main thing the main thing.
 
In fact, I could build an argument that living our life with a controlled sense of urgency is ultimately less stressful than screwing off too much, getting behind, and dealing with the stress of missed deadlines, broken agreements and disappointing results.
 
As you can tell, this post is really more about being a good steward of time. Time IS our most precious asset. Using it wisely, with a sensible sense of urgency that understands that each moment counts, is what works best for me at least. How about you?

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