Sunday Night Success

A number of years ago one of my favourite authors, Douglas Coupland, came to Calgary and my wife and I attended his reading.  His quirky perspective on life has always given me food for thought and comfort.

After he had finished his reading and explaining where the impetus of the book came from he decided to take some questions from the audience.

One such question was, “If you were able to go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice on how to live your life what advice would you give?” Interesting question, no?  So this accomplished author with creativity as big as the sky thinks long and hard about his answer.

His response – “I would tell myself,”When times seem tough and the moment seems to be crumbling in front of your eyes go grab a snack.  You are sugar crashing. Eat a granola bar and then see if that makes your situation better.”

The audience thought it was a throw away comment and laughed, in all honesty, I did too. In fact as my wife and I walked back to the car I told her how I felt that his comment seemed glib.

Years have since passed and I have since continued to read his books.

But as I have gone through my life his advice has stuck with me.  And when there were times that I thought I couldn’t handle the stress or didn’t think there was a solution to the problem that was in front of me instead of falling into despair – I ate a granola bar. Sure enough in 10 or 15 minutes I felt better and in turn solutions began to reveal themselves.

Turns out his advice that I thought was too simple was actually great advice.

So if the next time your are struggling in the moment go grab yourself a healthy snack and see if that makes your outlook better.

PS.  My favourite book of his is Girlfriend in a Coma.  Check it out.

For another great post about tools that you can add to your success toolbox check out this post.

“The broader the gap, the more challenged you are to get creative and committed.” – Thomas Leonard

SMART Goals

One of the more commonly used goal setting strategies that people use is known as SMART:

S: specific
M: measurable
A: attainable
R: realistic
T: timely

Many people have clearly explained the concept of the SMART system, so I am not going to review it here. For more information on how to use SMART to set your goals check here.

Is SMART always smart?

For the majority of your goals it is a good idea to follow the SMART system. However, at times, maybe it is better to ignore the “A” and “R” steps of this goal setting system.

What is wrong with making a goal attainable and realistic? Nothing. By making a goal both attainable and realistic you increase the likelihood of that goal being accomplished successfully.

What is the advantage of making a goal non-attainable and non-realistic?
You open yourself up to the process of evolution.

Thomas Leonard

I first came upon this idea while reading some of the written work of Thomas Leonard, the father of coaching. In his writing Thomas introduces the concept of “gapping”, which, in my interpretation, means to ignore making a goal attainable and realistic and “shoot for the stars”.

Gapping involves setting yourself a challenge that, chances are, is impossible, or almost impossible for you to succeed in accomplishing. The goal may involve skills you do not have, knowledge you are missing, or may have a time line that is too short to guarantee achievement. Some aspect of the goal makes it very difficult to achieve.

So, why attempt to gap a goal? I will let Thomas’ own words provide an answer:

” Take on an exciting goal or project that you cannot possibly accomplish. When the gap is this wide, mutation occurs.” – Thomas Leonard

Mutation and Evolution

By setting a possibly unreachable goal you push yourself. To have even a chance of succeeding in this impossible goal you will have to experiment, learn new skills, take risks, and go beyond your limits. Once the process is over, once you have tried all of these things, you are a different person: you have changed in some, and possibly many ways.

It does not matter if, in the end, you achieve the overall goal, what matters is that you made the attempt and improved yourself in the process. Not only will you improve yourself, but this evolution of who you are will have happened in a far shorter time span than you ever thought possible.

How to gap

Thomas’ writing did not go into specifics on how one should go about gapping, but I can see the process looking something like this:

1. Pick a goal that you have been putting off because it does not seem attainable or realistic: you don’t have the necessary skills, you are missing needed contacts, you are missing important information, you don’t have the time to complete it.
2. Set a specific result for the goal so that you are clear on what you are trying to achieve.
3. Set a clear measurement for the goal so you know when you succeed.
4. Set a short time period to achieve this goal so you stay focused on this challenging task.
5. Do whatever you need to and work as hard as you possibly can to achieve this goal in the time period you have set.
6. Determine how you have evolved from the experience, whether you were successful or not.

Does gapping work?

I have no idea. I have never tried it before, but I am going to give it a try now. Check back Friday when I pick the goal that I am going to attempt to gap, and then watch my progress in the coming weeks.

Even better: pick your own challenging goal that you would like to gap and add it to the comments section on Friday and join in on this experiment in goal setting.

Within each of us lives doubt.

Within each of us lives temptation.

One of the temptations that I have seen since I started setting my weekly actions is very sinister. What happens is I get to Friday afternoon and a couple actions would not have been completed. At that point an idea would present itself – I could put “complete” next to the actions that are not completed and my success partners would be none the wiser!

Did you see what happened there?

First of all I felt doubt whether or not I was going to complete a couple actions. This doubt exists within each of us. I view this whole thought process as a good sign. I like the fact that I am challenged a bit in my actions every week. This shows that I am pushing myself and that is what I need to be doing to make my dreams come true.

Second I felt tempted to lie. And technically I am right – my success partners would not have known but I would have known. My pride was getting in my way. In turn this cheapens what it is that I am trying to do because I start to doubt myself and the program.

I learned that it is best to shove the pride and laziness away. Try my best to get the actions completed before our next meeting and if I can’t treat the people that I trust and myself with the respect that we deserve.

We are only human and these feelings are to be expected. It isn’t the fact that we have these feelings that makes us more or less it is how we respond that shows us our real value.

_________________

If you are a recovering pessimist check out this post by Jeremie.

A change last week

Observant readers may have noticed something new at Sunday Night Success last week: a post from my good friend, and action partner Jason on “Three Tips for Setting Weekly Actions”. This post is the beginning of the next evolution of Sunday Night Success, and I am super excited to announce that this was not a guest post but a new and permanent feature that I know will greatly increase the value of Sunday Night Success to everyone in our growing community.

But wait, there’s more

I get to be super excited twice in the same week as I also get to announce that Vicky, another great friend, and the third member of the action setting group will also be joining in providing content to Sunday Night Success. Jason and Vicky will be alternating their posts every Thursday, providing you with plenty of new perspectives on how to set goals, actions, and achieve the results you have been looking for.

Sunday Night Success, Evolution 2.0 posting schedule

So, starting last week, and for the upcoming weeks this is what you can expect from us on Sunday Night Success:

Monday: Weekly Action Setting
Wednesday: A post from Jeremie
Thursday: A post from either Jason or Vicky
Sunday: Weekly Accountability

So, take a second and visit the “About Us” page to check out all three of your Sunday Night Success contributor’s profiles. Get to know us; I know that we are all looking forward to getting to know you.

Recovering Pessimist

One of the main areas of personal evolution I have been working on in 2009 is my pessimistic tendencies as well as my tendency to over-react instead of over-respond to situations. For the most part I have had a great deal of success and have become a much more positive person. On my recent vacation we even had a friend that we had not seen for a long time comment on the fact that she noticed I was much more positive.

I have been feeling pretty good about the changes I have made and have had to spend less of my energy focusing on being optimistic; it has started to feel more natural than it ever has in the past.

However, what I forgot is that I am still a work in progress, and that, by not being mindful of my positivity as much lately I have put myself in a position to have a breakdown.

The breakdown

It happened this morning, and it happened in a big way. After returning from our vacation my wife and I discovered that a bottle of soy sauce had exploded in our luggage and our clothes were covered. One thing led to another and the over-reacting pessimist busted out:

I yelled.
I ranted.
I blew things out of proportion.
I made extreme conclusions.
I announced ultimatums.

I lost it.

In terms of my positive – negative energy buckets, in a matter of minutes I filled my bucket with so much red that there is nothing I could have done over the rest of the day to balance it out with blue. In one uncontrolled negative, pessimistic, reactive moment I made sure that my day was red, with no hope of recovering.

You know what….it’s all right

After the dust had settled and my wife and I had separated for a bit I started to reflect on the situation and got ready to beat myself up for the breakdown. Then I realized there was no point in adding negative feelings to negative feelings and send myself further into a downward spiral. I realized it was all right, the breakdown wasn’t the end of the world. I may not have been able to save that day, but I could continue to improve all of the “next days”.

Improving yourself personally is tough work. Improving yourself personally isn’t something that is going to happen overnight, in an instant. Improving yourself is a process that is going to have its ups and downs, and, hopefully, over time there are more ups than downs.

So, instead of beating myself up and reflecting on what had just happened, I went the route of the optimist and started reflecting on all of the moments in the past year where I have succeeded in being positive. By focusing on the positive experiences I changed my attitude to “more positive” instead of “more negative”. I was also able to focus on how being positive made me feel and compare that to how being negative made me feel.

Perspective shift

Then I had the most important realization of all:

if I wasn’t trying to improve myself the breakdown wouldn’t have been a breakdown, it would have been the norm.

So next time you shift back into old behaviours: being pessimistic, having a smoke or a drink, yelling at your kids. Whatever the breakdown is, remember that you are working on it, and that the fact you even had a breakdown means that you are doing better than you were before you were even trying to change yourself for the better. Then, don’t focus on the feelings of the breakdown, concentrate on how you feel when you are having success with your challenging behaviour. This will help you to shift your perspective back in the correct direction.

And you know what? With this attitude in mind, I apologized to my wife, spent the rest of the day being positive, and managed to turn the overall day from red to blue.

What are you trying to improve in your life? What do you do to deal with breakdowns? I would love to know what works for you.