Slowing Down to Stay the Course

When I am pushing towards a new level of success, I often find that continuing to make progress requires slowing down, not speeding up. I need to pump the brakes a bit to get around the turn.

This is a difficult lesson to learn. I learned it the hard way. In fact, I didn’t learn it when I should have so I had to keep learning it the hard way until it clicked.

Years ago, I was trying to build up my strength and was doing some challenging exercises. I was pushing myself as hard as I could with my exercise routine.

Despite the success I was experiencing, I kept pushing. I knew I hadn’t hit the goal I set. But the problem was my pace of growth was slowing. So, I turned it up. I worked harder. I took more risk.

This resulted in a hernia. Because the focus wasn’t on using the right form and doing the right exercises, I injured myself. This resulted in months and months of time off. I had to have the surgery. I had to slowly recover. Then, when fully recovered, I had to start working from a much lower level.

This was frustrating. But I still didn’t learn the lesson. Unfortunately, I had similar system patterns appear in other areas. Extreme effort towards a goal turned into riskier behavior and less discipline. It resulted in burnout or a mistake that caused me to backslide.

If you are racing on a track, you need to be able to anticipate the curves and take them at a slower pace. You can’t expect the same speed to get you through. To keep pace, you need to use the brake.

When my body was getting sloppy in technique, I should have recognized it and not kept pushing harder. That resulted in lack of form and an injury.

Instead, I should have slowed down to keep the pace. I should have allowed a plateau to get my body to adjust to the new level. When I could achieve that level with proper form, I should increase efforts.

I’ve done this in the work environment as well. As soon as one big initiative is winding down, jumping to the next isn’t the right move. Instead, solidify the first project. Make sure it is solid. Don’t get too eager for a faster pace and ruin the hard work you oversaw.

Taking Responsibility to Gain Control

When you take 100% responsibility for your life, this is easier than when you blame others. I always say that you take 100% responsibility to gain control of life.

If you say that you are 100% responsible for everything in your life at this moment, both the good and bad, then you are going to be 100% responsible for your future. It is you who controls it, not something external.

There are always external circumstances. There are forces that push on you. There are things you couldn’t possibly know ahead of time. There are people that will do things that you couldn’t predict.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t own it. You own where you are because you own how you respond to it. You own the strategy you employed. You own the discipline or lack of discipline. You own how much you researched and prepared. You own how you responded when things didn’t go as planned.

Those outside forces aren’t the scapegoat. Most people don’t push themselves to success. They push themselves until they find a reason for their failure.

They want to say, “I didn’t achieve that sales number, but it was because the competitor used shady pricing to trick everyone to sign up with them.” They failed. They feel that their reason makes the failure as good as a success. But it doesn’t. It might be true, but it is still a failure, not a success.

I learned this difficult lesson years ago. I had a very challenging boss. When a vendor had an issue, he made it our issue. He didn’t accept anything other than complete success.

This meant when the vendor didn’t return my emails, I couldn’t go into the status meeting expecting a pat on the back for my efforts to email them. I couldn’t say, “well I did my job it is their fault.”

I had to do something else to get movement. I would pick up the phone and call.

When they told me they would look into it, I couldn’t provide that as an answer. The only acceptable answer was that it was solved. Anything less was as good as showing up saying I didn’t feel like getting it fixed or I forgot. All reasons/excuses did was provide distraction, but they didn’t absolve us from failure.

This forced me and my whole team to change how we approached problems. Knowing success was the only way through, we became willing to do whatever we had to do to get it resolved and not allow the reasons from the vendor to get in the way.

I learned how to work with vendors to tackle these problems. I would put pressure on them but do so in a partnership manner, not an adversary. I would follow up daily, sometimes more, whenever they missed a deadline, they promised me.

It was more work. Finding an excuse or reason to blame them was easier and less effort in the short term. But the problem didn’t get solved so the discomfort spread out over time. But concentrating the discomfort to the short-term, we were able to tackle problems head on and get them resolved quickly.

Pumping the Brakes to take Responsibility

By combining personal accountability with knowledge that sometimes you need to pump the brakes to keep the pace and not slide backwards, you become armed with the insight to truly grow.

Even if criticism comes from the slowdown, you own it and push on. When others tell you that you should have poured gas on the fire, not slowed down and given a break, you realize how foolish that advice is.

Learning when to slow down and when to speed up is more important than all-out effort. All-out effort usually results in “failure with a good reason” not success. If you are working towards success instead of “failure with a reason”, you need to take 100% responsibility and know when the pace is becoming unsustainable. Then, know that pumping the brakes is the best way to get past the curve and continue towards the finish line.