Life Doesn't Always Go According to Plan
Even the best laid plans sometimes go astray
Often in life we will make plans about how we want things to be, or what we want our lives to look like. We create a vision and then set goals to get there. We follow along with our plan with every fiber of our being.
This can lead to great achievements, but it can also lead to failure and disappointment when things don’t go our way.
In life, what we do when we fail can be equally important to what we do when we succeed. When you fail at something, it is super easy to beat yourself up. Many of us have a harsh inner critic and a negative inner monologue.
When things go badly, we tell ourselves things like
Of course things went wrong, I suck at completing my goals.
I’m not good enough to make my dreams come true.
I can never have the life that I want.
I don’t deserve to be happy.
I can never make things come out right.
On and on our negative thinking goes. Sometimes getting progressively more catastrophic as we go along. Then, we decide to give up on having a goal-directed life and settle in for whatever mediocre hand is dealt to us.
That’s the problem.
Giving up.
When we give up, there are no second chances. We aren’t even looking for a second chance, or trying to see what we could learn from our first failure.
The problem is, barely anyone succeeds at anything on the first try. We didn’t learn to walk, talk or ride a bike that way. Only, we have forgotten. We expect things to be easier than they are. So we throw in the towel after a single failed attempt.
If you want to be really successful, you have to keep going. You have to brush yourself off after a failure and try again. Sometimes several times.
According to Rose Lewis, when kids try to learn new words:
Basically, these studies suggest that the number of repetitions needed to learn a word is about 10-15 times, with lots of variation — among kids and words. For example, poor readers may require 12-25 reps to “learn” a word, while better readers may get away with only 8-12 (Lemoine, Levy, & Hutchison, 1993).
Think about it like this. If it takes 10-15 times just to learn how to read a word, think how many more repetitions it can take to learn a more difficult skill. We are selling ourselves short when we expect to get things right the first time.
Start expecting to go through a few failures as you learn. Start to embrace the opportunity to do better next time. When we can do this, then we can learn to do things more effectively.
We learn how to learn without all the blame.
Next time you don’t learn something right away, or complete your goal on the first try, start thinking back to when you were a kid. Give yourself some grace. Allow yourself to practice. It is only with practice that you are going to get better at something, and eventually you will complete your goal.
Practice makes perfect. Don’t try to skip out on the practice part and go straight to perfection!
Have a blessed day, my lovelies!
Nicole Dake