Success is a journey. We’ve all heard this before. It’s a simple concept and powerful too because it’s so obviously true. Success is about getting from where we are to where we want to go. Simple as that. Get your map out and get started. You’ll be there in no time.
Right?
OK. That’s not always true. We think it should be though, and we go about our lives as if it is true. That’s where we run into trouble. We don’t always anticipate and plan for the things that knock us off the path we’re following. When we look at the times we’ve been knocked off the Success Path, there are probably going to be common themes, actions and motivations threading through most of them.
Let’s look at the top three reasons we leave the Success Path.
Distractions – These can be divided into pleasurable and painful distractions. Pleasurable ones are easy to see. It’s so much nicer to sleep an extra hour instead of getting up to exercise and take care of our bodies sometimes. We might be exhausted from a physically demanding day or even a mentally demanding one. Or we just might enjoy the soft warm bed. While it’s OK to take a little extra sack time every once in a while, becoming a habit can kill your progress. It spirals out of control because it affects the rest of your day if you didn’t plan for it the night before. How many times have you woke up late and realized you have to rush to get everything done before you have to leave the house? That extra hour of sleep costs you two hours or more of lost productivity.
Painful distractions are ones that we’re trying to avoid. Have you ever avoided answering the phone because you don’t want to talk to the bill collectors? Almost everyone who’s ever struggled financially has had this experience. You stop answering unknown numbers and you get caught up in the worry about how to pay the bills. Avoiding the problem has become its own problem. You can’t concentrate on what needs to be done and you veer off the Success Path.
Conflicting Goals – This happens more often than you think it does. We all have Goals and Values that can and will conflict with each other. It doesn’t mean you need to get rid of one to keep the other. It just means that we’ve let the two get out of balance in most cases. Career and Family Goals and Values are the ones that most often come into conflict. We tend to spend too much time on work and career at the expense of our families. Left unchecked this can cause alienation between us and our spouse and children. It also can cause our work to suffer, so the thing that was causing the problems at home isn’t working now either. We have to be sensitive to the long-term impact of these imbalances. Nothing is ever perfectly balanced, so the key is to make sure that the imbalance doesn’t get too extreme or stay weighted to only one side all the time.
Overwhelm – This is a term that is interchangeable with several others. Depression. Angst. Anger. Sadness. Hopelessness. It’s a feeling of being out of control. We feel like we don’t know what we should do, because there’s too much to do or not enough. We either haven’t or won’t deal with problems until they become too much to think about. This can spiral out of control easily. Being overwhelmed in one area of life will lead to being overwhelmed in other areas. It’s like an avalanche that begins with a small pebble that rolls faster and faster, gathering more and more snow until it’s an unstoppable wall of cold pain and suffering. The best way to combat this is to keep breaking your big tasks and problems into ever smaller pieces that are small enough to take care of easily. The only danger here is to make sure you don’t break down too far and get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of things instead of just how big it is.
There are far more reasons to get off-track than I can go through here, but I would guess that 90% of all the reasons are some variation on these three. Learning to recognize them early and counteracting them sooner than later is the best way to stay on track. We’Ll always run into things that can throw us off track. Happens to even the best and highest achiever. The highest achievers have strategies in place and ready to use to stay on track. A little planning now on what to do when you wander off the path will save you weeks or even months and years of stress and delay on your Success Journey. Spend 15 minutes thinking about what causes you to go off track the most and come up with three ways to recognize it and three ways to counter each one. That 15 minutes could save you 15 years.
