Standing still to make progress

When we are working towards a goal, we often get to a point where the systems and habits start to drive our behavior. This turns into results.

During these times, sometimes the tendency is to keep pushing. We want to increase the pace of our improvement.

This can be a good thing. But it could also result in dropping all the way back to zero.

Years ago, I attended a conference about leadership. The speaker asked someone to join her onstage and toss a ball in the air. As the ball flew from one hand to the next, the speaker asked him to juggle a second ball.

The participant did this awkwardly, but still completed the task. Then, as a third ball was introduced and thrown into the mix, all three balls came falling to the ground.

The speaker then explained that when we have someone on our team performing at a high level, the natural tendency is to give them more responsibility. We do this with the assumption that we can easily back off if they get too much on their plate.

But more often what happens is that they suddenly drop all the balls. It isn’t a slight change where one ball falls, they drop everything.

Shifting this to our own personal pursuit of success, our tendency is to keep adding more and pushing for more. We do this assuming it will lead to improvement, or at least will keep things as they are, and this new change will be all that is at risk.

The systems and habits approach to improvement focuses our efforts to allow us to avoid this if we are deliberate. The systems and habits approach takes our individual accomplishments and turns them into recurring actions, without our focus and attention.

If we can take the juggling example and turn the steps into habits, it will be easier to keep going and adding more. But without the practice and habit-forming, we max out.

This is why I usually recommend that at each new level, we shift from trying to add more, to solidifying what we already did. We turn it into a new system. This means that we need to be patient.

It almost feels as though we stop and stand still just as we start to gain momentum. It goes against every natural urge to succeed. We feel we need to push for more, yet stopping to make sure that level remains secure will help us continue to grow without falling all the way down.

This is why standing still could be just as important to keep making progress. Most people who lose weight, eventually gain it all back. This is because they didn’t establish those levels as they saw results.

They used more and more effort. They didn’t form new habits. They didn’t make long-term, lifestyle changes, they pushed towards their goal.

While many would argue that setting goals and using effort is the only way to succeed, I see it as the means to an end. Willpower doesn’t stay high forever. We need help. That help is to use habit. We need to develop the right systems to drive us towards success.

If we can leverage the habits and systems, we can improve much more. We can turn it into habit and make success and happiness become automatic.