2.You’ve lost hope.
Reason # 1 was about not taking aim, but let’s say you’ve taken aim. You know the probability that you’re going to hit a target that you don’t specify or aim at is EXTREMELY low. So, you’ve defined it. You’ve even chased it, and you miss. You feel like you’ve lost.
You’ve probably done a good bit of that. But that’s good.
Look, it’s not about you being bad at aiming. The target moves. It changes. And you change in relation to it when you start moving towards it. So you need to re-calibrate. That is missing; it’s re-calibration.
Since the target moves and changes, you should aim at the thing and move forward, and as you move forward, you can adjust your aim. You learn what you need to adjust your aim. So it doesn’t even matter if your initial plan is really all that accurate.
The fix for this problem is to start with enough confidence and perspective that “failing is not failing, but re-calibration.” People who don’t have confidence in their ability wait to feel hope that comes with “better timing” or a “good start.” If you were my client, we would talk through the problems you’ll face until you feel confident enough to start badly and build yourself better and better throughout the process.
You just need an aim that’s compelling enough to you, in particular, to inspire you to take action and weather all of the changes necessary to get there.
Even if you take a break and smash cinnamon rolls and Tang for three days, you’re not out of the race. You’re lying to yourself about the “break” because you didn’t fail. You’re still in, bucko. You and your target have been moving, and the sooner you read your short-cast vision and re-calibrate, the sooner you’ll feel progress again; the closer you’ll be to realizing that vision. You also won’t feel so bad about the Cinnabon-binger.
