Ever wonder why 80% of new years resolutions fail? Ever wonder why your team just doesn’t seem to hit goals? Why do most people not even set goals?
The main reason is that growth whether it be personal, professional, or physical is painful. Growth is not easily achieved which is why there are so few people achieving the next level results.
I recently took my son to the orthodontist to start his journey for a better smile while getting braces installed on his teeth. He asked me what it was like since I had them twice. Yes, it typically takes me double to achieve results than most people 😊 I told him that the initial process is not very hard as they apply the torture devices to your teeth, but that he should expect to have a 6 out of 10 on the pain scale for his teeth for the following few days.
His response was that he was okay just not getting braces. He didn’t care that it would improve his smile, or fix some issues in his mouth that would help him. He just wanted to avoid pain and discomfort. It dawned on me in that moment that I am not alone. I don’t always want to do the hard things because it will cause me discomfort.
Most individuals will avoid pain at all costs to live an comfortable lifestyle. What I’ve learned is that nothing worthy is every easy. There is some level of pain and risk associated with any worthy venture.
If we want to grow financially for most cases, we need to gain education, work hard, and budget. None of this seems fun or comfortable either. My mother always said, “ nothing ventured, nothing gained.” I added to that that no pain, no gain. Okay I may have borrowed that from some weight lifter somewhere.
If we want to grow, we need to put in effort and accept levels of discomfort / pain. When we want to gain muscle, we are actually ripping apart muscle strands during weight lifting exercises that repair themselves when we are sleeping that increases their size. The same is true with anything we want to grow in.
We must accept that we will have some levels of pain to grow ourselves in whatever venture we take on. We need to review our why and figure out the cost of achieving that why. If the why is not greater than the costs, then we will have no chance at success.
We should be adding to the process of goal setting what our why is next to each of our goals to decide if this is a good goal or not. Otherwise, we are just hoping that we will make it and likely will fail to hit that goal.
Over the pandemic I had to review quite a few things I wanted to do with my business and had to go through quite a few pain points when I created all my videos, online trainings, marketing ideas, and personal decisions like losing weight.
Each and every one of these things required me to sit down and figure out my why. If I had a great why I have achieved my goal, but if my why was small or something superficial, I did not achieve that goal.
If you have a goal for yourself, it is a great step to review your why before setting out the goal. Yes, we need to make goals that are easy to understand and measurable, but we also need to make sure we factor in the pain level we will have to endure to make these goals possible before we set out. We risk a higher levels failure when things get tough if we have not done this planning.
As we are heading into the fourth quarter of 2021 lets start reviewing our goals that we created for the year and understand why we failed at some and why we succeeded at others. The why will be a great area of focus.
If you’re curious I did lose quite a bit of weight during 2021 by dieting which was very painful, but worth it!
If you have any questions, or would like to discuss this topic more, feel free to reach out, I’d be glad to have that conversation.
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business. I teach your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate more sales with high margins!”