In our last article here, I finished up by saying that successful people keep trying until they get what they want. They have persistence. But in the very first of these articles you may also remember the saying that “If you keep doing the same things in the same way, you’re always going to get the same results”!
Unfortunately, by doing the same things, some people who consider that they are really making the effort and are working hard can feel great frustration, or even hopelessness, at their lack of success. There is a phrase about knowing the difference between “working hard” and “working clever”. Someone could be working really hard digging a field with a spoon. But someone else could do it much more cleverly and efficiently by going about it in a different way. Don’t get me wrong, “working clever” may still be hard work, but the results achieved, relative to that work, are much greater. As the Americans say, “You get more bang for your buck”.
So, how can you begin to “work clever”? At this stage in our self-coaching course, the next steps can be basically described in two words, Observation and Flexibility.
So, what do I mean by “Observation”? This is something you need to practice and develop in the context of achieving your goal. As we work towards our desired outcome, we need to take note along the way of the effectiveness of what we have done. We need to take stock regularly and see if what we have done at each step has achieved what we expected it to achieve. We need to check regularly if we are on schedule, or if we seem to be running to stand still. We need to make sure, on the other hand that what we are, or have been, doing isn’t making things more difficult for ourselves. Very simply, is your current activity producing the results you want?
Obviously it is a good idea to do this very methodically, by monitoring and recording results and progress. But you can also develop your own senses, (what we call “Intuition”), and use this to monitor how you are feeling. This will give you information about your progress, or lack of it! Internal observation, if you like.
Our emotions and feelings are designed to be signals to us. For example, fear is a warning of danger. Grief signals a loss. Feelings of happiness or contentment are signals to us from our subconscious that all seems to be well. A sense of achievement is a sign that we feel that something has been completed to our satisfaction. So, negative feelings like failure, sadness, disappointment or frustration are signals from our subconscious that things are not going to our satisfaction.
Although they are always there, many of us are almost unaware of, or pay very little attention to our feelings. But these messages from our deeper mind can tell us a lot. And we can begin to make the effort to become more aware of them and use them, along with our external observations, to tell us if our behaviours or actions are producing the results we desire.
If we find that we’re not feeling good, then we need to develop the “Flexibility” to change what we are doing and we will look at that in the next article.