A teacher once told me that one of the trickiest things to manage with ambitious students is that they work hard towards a goal and, as soon as it’s in sight, they formulate a new, tougher goal and aim for that instead. Now that might sound like a good thing because the students get ever higher grades. Indeed if grades were all teachers were interested in, it would be a good thing. However, a good teacher cares about the student’s welfare too, and the problem with this approach is that the student never feels good enough because they never attain their goals. By definition, they’re always falling short. You can see how this can paradoxically diminish their self-esteem as their achievements increase.
A lot of us did this as students8 and continue to do it as adults. Some of us didn’t do it at all as students9 but still manage to adopt the habit as adults. Whether it’s at work or in our personal lives, we keep raising the bar so we can never quite reach it. And then we berate ourselves for not reaching the bar that we deliberately moved because we were about to reach it. How bonkers is that?
If this is you – and I think you know very well if it is – you need to recognise how daft it is and change your thinking because it’s not making you happy. And it’s not actually making you achieve any more either. Remember Rule 27 and focus on the journey. You’ll progress at least as fast as you would if your eyes were on the prize and you’ll be less tempted to keep raising the bar.
Think of a flight of stairs. Let’s say there are 30 steps. It could be a steep set of stairs heading straight up to the top. But it isn’t. This flight has 10 steps and then a small landing. Then another 10 steps before the next landing. So every 10 stairs you can pause briefly and get your breath back. OK, fix that image in your mind.
Now, here’s the important thing: don’t move the bar. The bar is set at the first landing and it stays there. When you reach the first landing, congratulate yourself. Well done, you’ve achieved your aim. You can look back down the steps and see how much ground you’ve covered. Enjoy the feeling of success for a moment. You deserve to feel good about yourself.
Right, now you’ve proved you can do that successfully, how about a completely new bar? Let’s see … why not put it at the next landing, 10 steps up? Repeat the process and enjoy the feeling of success in 10 steps’ time. And keep repeating it.
This is simply a fresh way of thinking about a task, an ambition, a challenge. It doesn’t slow you down, it doesn’t make you achieve less in the end, it just changes your attitude to yourself as you go. Breaking the task into sections is a good practical approach, but you need to separate out the bars that go with those sections in order to keep feeling good about yourself as you go.
THE BAR IS SET AT THE FIRST LANDING AND IT STAYS THERE