Keep going
Scott Miker
From time to time, all of us feel stuck. We feel that we are exhausting everything to reach a goal and feel the results have plateaued.
I find myself here all the time. It feels discouraging and tiring. But I’ve also learned that these times are crucial on the improvement journey.
These tend to be the times where I am faced with the most important decision, to keep going or to stop.
Stopping often sounds like the right choice. Why keep going towards a goal that isn’t being realized even though you are putting in more effort than ever thought would be needed to reach the goal?
The reason this happens is because we really don’t understand the full path towards something until we have traveled it.
GPS in cars makes it incredibly easy to find a new location without getting lost. But whenever I set out to reach a new destination, I realize how much I don’t know from the maps view that I learn from the actual drive.
I see first-hand the tricky intersections and construction cones. I realize the tricky drive entrance that I would miss if I were not careful. I see the hills and valleys that come alive after leaving the flat world of the computer map.
The same thing is true when we strive to reach a goal. In the beginning we oversimplify it. We do this because we just don’t really know what the journey will be.
And these feelings of being stuck often come because we are on a stretch of the journey that we were unfamiliar with.
Therefore, we should work to keep going through these periods. We should strive to keep doing the minimum or keep making progress. We should shift from a mindset of keep going or quit, to be on how do I keep going?
After doing this often I started to realize that many times the next breakthrough is right around the corner and usually requires some sort of shift or flexibility on my part. I need a slight pivot to break through the malaise and keep growing.
So if you find yourself in this stuck feeling, keep going. Change your mindset from wanting to quit to simply asking how you can keep going. Because if you keep going you just might find the next great breakthrough in your journey, one that you probably never imagined when you first set out to achieve something.