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January 4, 2018 - January 14, 2019
Life can feel chaotic and uncertain, and disbelief is one way to brace ourselves for the worst. But I think the reason goes even deeper. Most of us have a long history of not getting what we want out of life.
One of the best ways to overcome all the uncertainty we experience in the world and make progress on your most important goals is to become fully aware of how much agency and control you actually have. It’s far more than you think.
Dragging the worst of the past into the best of the future is another reason our goals fail. If we get closure on the past, especially those efforts that went unnoticed and unrewarded, we’re able to more confidently step into the future.
If our habits of thinking are beneficial, we tend to experience positive results, such as happiness, personal satisfaction, even material success. If our habits of thinking are counterproductive, however, we often experience the opposite: unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and the nagging feeling that the deck is somehow stacked against us.
Our beliefs play a massive part in how we approach life. We tend to experience what we expect.
Because our expectations shape what we believe is possible, they shape our perceptions and actions. That means they also shape the outcomes. And that means they shape our reality.
One of the biggest reasons we don’t succeed with our goals is we doubt we can. We believe they’re out of reach.
It’s sad, but the greater the number of setbacks we’ve experienced in life, the less likely we are to believe we can prevail. Doubt is a goal toxin.
It’s hard to get your hopes dashed if you never get them up to begin with. But that kind of cynicism poisons our souls and sabotages our results. Our beliefs about what’s possible have a direct impact on the reality we experience.
“You don’t think about strategies when you think that outcome is inevitable,” said Dorfman.
“Many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us,” say Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. “Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view.”
The first key difference between an unmet goal and personal success is the belief that it can be achieved.
Researchers label the first group entity theorists. They think their abilities are set in stone. You’ve heard people say this: “I’m just no good at x, y, or z.” These are the scarcity thinkers. Researchers call the second group incremental theorists. When they struggle with an obstacle, they just look for new approaches to the problem. They know there’s a workaround or a solution if they just keep working at it. These are the abundance thinkers.
Repeated setbacks can train us to assume the worst. They can condition us to hoard what we have and avoid risks.
“The undeniable reality is that how well you do in life and business depends not only on what you do and how you do it . . . but also on who is doing it with you or to you,” says psychologist Henry Cloud in The Power of the Other.
So ask yourself: What’s not in your world right now that could be, must be there?
As we begin to think about designing our best year ever, we need to recognize that most of the barriers we face are imaginary. There are a million thoughts running through our heads, but we alone get to choose what we’re going to believe.
A limiting belief is a misunderstanding of the present that shortchanges our future.
In all of these examples, changing beliefs made better outcomes possible. It’s not magic. You already have what it takes to move the needle in your life.
We all have more power than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. According to Stanford University psychology professor Albert Bandura, this power comprises four properties that help us achieve our goals. The first is intention. We can imagine a better reality than the one we’re currently experiencing. And we can work with others and within our circumstances to achieve it. Second, forethought. By visualizing the future, we can govern our behavior in the present and give purpose and meaning to our actions. Third, action. We have the ability to act on our plans, to stay motivated, and to
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Resources are never—and I mean never—the main challenge in achieving our dreams.
“There is no deficit in human resources,” as King said in his 1964 Nobel lecture, “the deficit is in human will.”
Resources are necessary, but they’re never the precondition for success. The perceived lack of resources is often a benefit in disguise.
Economist Julian Simon called human creativity the ultimate resource, but often limitations are needed to unleash it. A lack of resources spurs resourcefulness. Limited resources also builds resiliency and confidence. The more times we overcome difficulties, the more capable we are of overcoming whatever comes next.
If your goal is big enough, you’ll probably require more and different resources than you assume when you start. But start. A lack of resources is never a good excuse to stay put. Treat it instead as a prompt for what to tackle as the next step toward your goal.
It’s important to note that people are sometimes addicted to their limiting beliefs,
If you think your age is the problem, you need to reframe.
When we obsess on what’s wrong, we miss what’s right. It skews our view and blinds us to opportunities all around us.
Start living from the perspective of this new, liberating truth. You might not fully buy into it. That’s fine. Try it on. It may feel awkward at first, like putting on a coat that’s too big. But if you keep telling yourself the truth, it will eventually fit, and you’ll get more comfortable with it.
Sometimes we live inside unhelpful stories we tell ourselves. Other times we nurse grievances to justify our current actions or feel unvalued because we were slighted or disregarded in some way. If we don’t get resolution, we’ll drag all our unfinished business into the future, and it will sabotage everything we’re trying to build going forward.
completing the past is all about moving into the future.
But as journalist Carina Chocano says, “The point of regret is not to try to change the past, but to shed light on the present.”
It’s important to observe not only what went wrong but also what went right and how your beliefs and behaviors contributed to that outcome. We often downplay this or never think to do it. But it’s key to recognizing our agency and how we’ve overcome obstacles already.
Brown said. “If you have no regrets, or you intentionally set out to live without regrets, I think you’re missing the very value of regret.”
I don’t mean to minimize the pain of regret. The pain can be real and intense. The problem is how quickly we distance ourselves from it. We’d rather not live with the feeling long enough to gain the benefit.
Worse, self-directed regrets sit on the evidence table in the criminal court of our minds as an ever-expanding mound of exhibits, proving all our worst limiting beliefs about ourselves.
We’re all fallible, so if you believe you are a failure, you’ll never run out of proof.
If, on the other hand, you believe you fail, you can begin evaluating what’s missing in your performance and seek corrective action. You’re not a failure, so the failure you do experience creates dissonance that requires your attention to resolve.
As Landman says, “Regret may not only tell us that something is wrong, but it can also move us to do something about it.”
Gratitude is a game of contrasts. Our circumstances look a certain way; then something happens to improve them. Gratitude happens when we take notice of the distance between the two.
Imagining something good never happening “made it seem surprising and special again, and maybe a little mysterious,” according to Wilson.
You don’t usually drift to a destination you would have chosen. Instead, you have to be intentional, force yourself to get clear on what you want and why it’s important, and then pursue a plan of action that accomplishes your objective.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has done pioneering research on risk aversion. “We are driven more strongly to avoid losses than achieve gains,” he says. “The aversion to failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to achieve it.”
A study by Locke and Latham found that workers in one field experiment were able to keep production at 100 percent even when their time was cut by 40 percent.10 The new deadline created huge gains in productivity—and we can experience the same sort of gains in our personal and private lives when we set near-term goals, leaving more margin for other pursuits.
