Personal confidence comes from making progress towards goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities.
— Dan Sullivan
Have you ever been to a gym in January? It is crowded with many people pursuing their New Year’s Resolutions of better health. But, visit that same gym again in early February and many of those who were so motivated a month earlier are no longer showing up.
I know have had that experience and many others like it. I get excited about a new goal and dive in with both feet. Then, after a short time of extreme effort, I burn out and return back to my previous normal. The problem with this cycle is that it erodes our confidence in our ability to grow, improve and achieve grand goals.
In order to start rebuilding our confidence, we need to work towards goals that push us to be bigger and better. This can be challenging if we have a lot of experience not achieving our goals. What we need to do is build a new habit of goal achievement.
We can build a habit of goal achievement as we set goals that will stretch us and then take small, consistent steps towards them. We don’t need to make unreasonable, immediate changes. We should not expect that we will dramatically change in an instance. That is not how change works. We make changes by degrees over time. This is great reason for hope because while rapid, dramatic change seems impossible; it is much easier to trust in our ability to make incremental change.
Incremental change takes time and effort. We need to be patient with ourselves and patient with the process. As we make this steady change, our confidence in our ability to change grows, and as our confidence in our ability grows we will be able to achieve bigger and better goals.
Think of a time when you had success in achieving your goals. How did that make you feel? How can you use that confidence to help you achieve the goals you have now?