| Greetings Friend,
Life......
Can be pretty brutal sometimes.
There are some days where it seems no matter which way we turn arounds, there are new challenges and difficulties to deal with, heartaches and betrayals, failures and setbacks, bitter disappointments, health issues and money problems.
But at the end of the day it's just life. No one get a free ride to bypass all of the hurts.
So the question is how do you keep yourself going, even when things are tough?
Persistence is a learned trait. This means that persistence is most often a choice. It’s a matter of believing in oneself and finding a way to reach the end result when the first three strategies failed.
Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He failed in business at the age of 21. He was defeated in a legislative race at age 22, failed again at business at age 24, overcame the death of his lover at age 26, had a nervous breakdown at age 27, lost a congressional race at 34 and 36, lost a senatorial race at 45, failed to become vice president at 47, lost a senatorial race at 49, and then finally was elected president of the United States of America at age 52.
Imagine what our country might look like today if he hadn’t persisted through those previous failures.
There’s the famous story about Thomas Edison trying 9,999 times to perfect the light bulb — and he couldn’t do it. Someone said, “Are you going to have 10,000 failures?” And he responded, “I didn’t fail; I just discovered another way not to invent the electric light bulb.”
He chose how he perceived his previous experiences -- and decided not to perceive them as failures.
How about Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken? He was a military retiree and had nothing to his name, except his mother’s chicken recipe. So what did he do? He took his old sports wagon out and began driving to restaurant after restaurant after restaurant. His intention was to sell the chicken recipe, but he was turned down time and time again, 1,007 times before he received his first yes. That one yes is what made possible Kentucky Fried Chicken possible.
We could keep going with story after story of those who had to be flexible, creative, and most of all persistent despite failing hundreds, sometimes thousands of times. I’ll share with you just one more: I want to tell you about Steve Jobs. He’s had movies made about his story, so you are likely more familiar with the challenges he faced in becoming one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Members of his own board of directors kicked him out of his own company. He could have allowed this to stop him, but instead he came back to Apple and was voted back in as chairman of Apple. He created the iPod, the iPhone and a new line of Mac computers. If you’re like me, business today is unthinkable without your iPhone.
So, what are the steps to increasing your level of persistence?
1. Clarify your why. By identifying the deep purpose behind your goal, your "why" will push you through the challenging times. I recommend writing out in detail what it means to you to have this goal complete.
2. Map out the possibilities. Identify all of the different means and methods you could use to reach your goal. I'm sure we can all agree that there's more than one way to reach a desired result. No matter what that result is, there are multiple avenues to reach the destination. By mapping out all of the ways you can reach you goal, you can easily adjust if one strategy isn't working.
3. Take action. Nothing can ever be created without measurable action. Get started and adjust as you need to along the way.
Time and time again, individuals are stopped along their journey. Just because they failed once doesn’t mean their failures define them or that their project will never work. It simply means, as Thomas Edison believed, they found one more way it didn’t work. But that means they are one step closer to achieving the result.
I hope some of these examples of persistence can help you in your life. And the beautiful thing is that this will work not only for your fitness journey but in every area of your life.
Committed to Your Success,
Coach Eddie Akan 713-794-6454 |
