Success in 12 Months: Your Month of Persistence
Welcome back to our “Success in 12 Months” series, and now we’re into Month 4, where we’re going to be covering a powerful topic called persistence.
How persistent are you? That’s really what I want to ask you and really get you to contemplate and reflect on.
Are you a persistent person? Do you have a persistent personality? Do you stick with things or do you easily give up when things get a little bit tough? I think all of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, probably fall into both categories. It kind of just depends on the situation.
What we want to do this month is focus on strengthening our persistence muscle, so to speak.
I think you would agree, and many people argue, that persistence is pretty much the most powerful success trait there is. The reason is that if you don’t persist it means you quit, and if you quit then you never get what you want out of life.
The people that ultimately get what they want are the people that have just tried something again and something new and something else until they ultimately got to where they want to go.
The problem is, we often look at successful people, people that have achieved great things or that are way further up the ladder or further down the road closer to where we want to be, and we’re nowhere near there yet, and we just see their results and we see all the success they have in their lives.
But we forget that they were once where we’re at and probably even further back, and they probably had a whole bunch of failures and they had to try a lot of different things that didn’t work.
But it was their persistence that allowed them to continue forward and get to where they are right now.
Those people aren’t done yet. If you’re looking at someone right now and admiring where they’ve got to in their life and what they’ve achieved, chances are–and I can pretty much promise you this–they’re still looking way down the road and they’re striving for way bigger goals now.
They’re still persisting through a whole new level of challenges and obstacles that they have to get through.
Persistence never ends. It’s really about setting your visions to where you want to be and then doing whatever it takes, as long as it takes, until you get there.
Persistence, unfortunately, is not something that people do naturally and it’s very easy to give up. In this program we’re talking about 10-year visions. When you think about things you can achieve over the course of 10 years, it’s fun, it’s very exciting to think of the trips you want to take or the missions you have to accomplish and help people, I don’t know what it is for you, but you look at the end result and you think how great it would be.
Then it comes to the action taking that we talked about in those goal steps, and that can be a very long, drawn out process. It’s very easy to lose touch with where we’re going and very easy for us to just stop persisting.
Things get very difficult. They get frustrating. Road block after road block gets thrown up and we just don’t want to persist anymore.
So we actually want to use this month to train these persistent muscles so that really persistence is who we become. I like to say that I am persistent. I just keep going no matter what.
The good news is that persistence is actually a skill, so we’re going to be developing that skill this month. And you can learn it, but you can also train it.
It’s all about our ability to bounce back from failure and just power through those obstacles that we’ve been talking about.
Persistence is the great equalizer. Men and women with less ability can outperform their more naturally talented peers through persistence alone. Persistence is the ability to power through the obstacles in your life. There will be obstacles. Some people claim this is the most important trait for anyone who wishes to be successful. This month you will work on exercises designed to awaken your persistence.
Your First Exercise in Persistence
Persistence comes down to facing of any obstacles that arise and overcoming them!
One thing we rarely think about is how many difficult things we’ve come through successfully in the past. Make a list of 10 times you’ve persevered and been successful. This will help you to realize that you can do it again with any future obstacles.
Next week, I will present your next exercise to help you power through with persistence. In the meantime, I invite you to share with me your progress throughout your program. Share your thoughts, insights, inspirations and results with me in the comments section below, or you can shoot me an e-mail and let me know what’s going on.
Your partner in persistence,
James