Winning every day

If I taught you music or math once upon a time, I was really trying to teach you how powerful your mind is. (Image by Andrew Martin)

When you’re confident, you can aim for a goal that will require more resources than you have.

You won’t reach the goal — you can’t — but maybe you’ll get farther than you would have if you had set your sights on something more reasonable.

I’ve spent a lot of my career exploring what happens when this doesn’t work. When someone sets a goal they had no business trying to reach, without the confidence to survive falling short. Or worse, when someone is trying desperately to keep up with someone else’s standard whether or not it is something they wanted to do in the first place, whether or not that someone else is still living, and whether or not that standard is real or imagined.

What do we do then? How do we rebuild the will to try again? What habits need to be developed and what practices need to be learned? And how might we adjust our expectations and our definition of success so that winning is possible?

There is a tension between what I believe is required and what the other person is willing to tolerate, even in very young children. I have not fully learned how to resolve this tension, but I can name it: I advocate for a lowering of the bar and an easing of the demands we place on ourselves in order to build success upon success and enjoy the process, whereas the person I’m trying to help wants to maintain their standard, punish their missteps, and keep trying again the same way.

“That’s baby stuff. That’s too easy. If I do that, I’ll never get anywhere. I want to do this instead.” And so the cycle continues.

The irony, of course, is that they are never going to get anywhere if they continue doing what they’ve been doing. The gentler path, full of switchbacks and rest stops, promises to get them all the way to the top of the mountain, but they are wary of it and resist taking it.

It’s only when someone is willing to associate good feelings with progress (and vice versa) that they are open to new way. The’ve got to get used to winning every day as a way of life instead of believing that only the grueling grind is evidence of forward motion.

For example, suppose you are trying to stick to a schedule after years of failure at doing so. What we frequently do is build a schedule so detailed that, should we stick to it, we will achieve incredible feats.

Of course, that’s why you’ll fail: You’ve created something impossible to stick to. That’s not a failure of your willpower — it was a weakness in the plan itself.

In order to build success into the plan instead of failure, you can build in more wiggle room, especially while you’re learning to navigate sticking to a schedule. Better to build the wiggle room in than to have a habit of assuming that every day goes to hell because you’re not disciplined enough (which is what makes a lot of people give up on schedules, diets, budgets, and so on).

The wiggle room feels strange, though. If you’re going to the trouble to create the plan, why would you make it so that it only achieves a fraction of what you intend?

You do it because following through on what you said you would do is meaningful in itself. When you recognize this as the victory that it is, you realize that it’s in your power to do it again and again. And that is the secret to long-term success, not determinedly pushing through heavy obstacles against all odds.

So much in life is out of our control. When we carefully regulate the things that are in our hands and give ourselves a chance to clear these moderate hurdles, we gain the self-efficacy and emotional resilience to keep going. We’ll feel good about our accomplishments instead of constantly flogging ourselves to work harder. When we learn to find satisfaction in our work, that’s when we’re truly unstoppable.