Making ‘It’ the Most

We can achieve just about anything we set our minds to – and certainly those within our direct reach. What stops us is nothing if not a lack of focus.

We’re so commended for being single-minded in our approach to things. Ask anyone who’s lost a significant amount of body weight or given up smoking how they did it and they’ll likely tell you it became the most important thing for them at that point in their lives.

Focus and Passion

The trouble for too many of us, however, is we eventually pile all that weight back on (and then some) or we take up our cigarettes again. And we did this probably because we lost our focus and passion, and it’s these that are most difficult to maintain.

The change must clearly become formed into our identities. It must entrench itself within us and make us different people—people who are able to house and contain the change.

Anything! – Within Reach

Having failed very many times to start habits or end habits, and having learned the hard way, I am convinced.

We can achieve anything we set our minds to achieve, but for a time, then it’s going to be the ongoing maintenance of the thing, and that’s down to us. And we need be prepared—maintaining the resolve is more the problem than producing the energy to begin it.

Another way of looking at this issue of supporting hard change is via the old fashioned ‘bath tub’ curve where we’re more likely to fail at the very beginning or end of our ventures—the middle is simply sustaining whatever inertia we’ve already got running. The ‘end’ in these terms is that time when we back off the pressure and get comfortable again.

For the person who’s reached their goal weight there’s nothing left to achieve. Or is there? It’s harder to stay at the top than make it there in the first place. We clearly need to continue those good dietary and exercise habits for the rest of our lives. It becomes terminal. When we’ve achieved our goals we find that that’s when self-discipline really needs to kick in.

Anything is possible for us provided it’s within our direct control, and there are more things that concern us, which are within our direct control, than we readily reckon most of the time.

It all depends on how important it is for us, and how important we make it for each of the rest of the days of our remaining lives.

Therein lies another ages-old secret; live life one day at a time. That’s an easy concept to understand and just a little harder to execute with consistency day in, day out.

But it is possible.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.