Have you ever made a commitment to do something you really want to do but can’t quite get over the hump with it? Examples of these activities include: exercising, practicing an instrument, learning new skills, school, or practically anything that requires a high level of intensity and sacrifice in order to achieve your goals. Quite often we set high goals for ourselves and begin the daunting task of making those things routine in our lives. Once something becomes routine it is easy to do without any focus or effort, but its hard to get there. In this post I hope to identify a primary reason why we have so much trouble succeeding at these commitments, give an example from my life of this, and then discuss how to fix the problem.
The Problem
So you have a goal. In this example we will use working out, but it really can be anything that requires constant determination and effort. Your goal is to work out four days a week for an hour each session. You know this will get you into shape and you believe you can do it with ease. Now that you have established a goal, you start doing it. You very quickly realize how much work is required to keep at it, eventually missing a few workout sessions here and there until you don’t go at all.
What happened here? One of the major problems that occurs with our commitments is that we have a false assumption at how good we will be at a given task. For example the person who made the above commitment hadn’t worked out in a long time, and an hour four days a week was a lot of work, but they thought they could do it easily. The false expectation of their abilities caused them to commit to something that was beyond their will power. The commitment and expectation effectively raised the bar of entry for the task to become routine. The higher this bar of entry is the harder it is to mentally overcome the barrier.
What happens next is that the failure causes a peson to begin to doubt themselves. Their confidence in the own will power becomes so low by all of the failures that they expect to fail at all of their commitments.
The goal of this post is to identify areas in your life where you have raised the bar too high, so that you can focus on creating realistic expectations thus lowering the bar.
Real World Example: Me
I want efficiency! I want to be as efficient as possible at everything in my life (productivity, work out, school). I create higher bars by expecting high efficiency from all the tasks I complete in a day. I will introduce two examples from my life where this caused me to fail over and over again, and that when I eventually created realistic expectations I won.
Bicycle Commuting: I live about 5 miles from school. I have been trying to bike/exercise at least 5 days a week for the past two years. I finally realized that my desire to always be the best was raising the bar so high that I could never consistently ride my bike. I realized that I expected to be at school within 20 minutes. I had broken the barrier twice and I created an expectation of completing my journey within 20 seconds or so of that mark. To bike to school in 20 minutes required a lot of strenuous effort, which was a turn off to me. When I finally realized that this is what stopped me from biking I set a more realistic expectation for “tired nathan” at 25 minutes per ride. Once I made this realization I immediately started riding more often, even when I was tired. This was a revolutionary change in my life because I no longer felt like I had to strive so hard. It was better for me to lower the bar and work out consistently than to demand a high cost and quit to quickly.
Time scheduling: I always wanted to be right on time (I still do!). This caused me to plan on arriving at a location about 1 minute till the meeting or whatever started. It also made me overestimate my ability to accomplish a task quickly. Last semester I constantly set up expected times for studying, and when it would take two or three times as long I would get upset with myself and lack of effort. The truth was that it wasn’t for a lack of effort, but because I expected more from me than I was able to give.
Solution: Set Realistic Expectations
The person in the above example should set a goa for themselves at three times a week for a half an hour, and if that doesn’t work out go with two times a week. The key is for that person to identify what it is about the task that is making the bar too high.
Start looking at goals or tasks in your life that you want to do and just can’t quite accomplish. Ask yourself,
- Am I being honest with how long this will take?
- Am I expecting too much effort from myself?
- Can I relax the requirement to accomplish this activity in terms of time and or effort?
- How far do I need to lower the entry bar to be consistent at it?
Life isn’t about making one big change. Its about being in a constant state of transformation into something better. One cannot hope to be transforming huge things in a not time. We must realize this and set our expectations where we can honestly work hard, but still not be overwhelmed by the task. It is more important to do a task at a low level than to not do it at all. You must identify what it is that makes it too hard for you and fix it in some way. This requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. Have fun!
Let me know of your successes and failures as you try this.
-nathan
