Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘goal setting’

I have written a lot about the fear of failure, but I think many people are not aware this fear has a twin brother – the fear of success.

Fear of failure will make you try to fit into a standard (usually external), but fear of success will make you do anything to avoid reaching that standard.

While fear of failure is out there and everybody knows about it, fear of success is hidden so deep in our identity we may not recognize it, but it can be much worse for us.

Fear of failure is associated with making mistakes and not getting approval, while fear of success is the fear of doing things right and therefore not being accepted, not being appreciated and not being able to maintain the level of achievement and success.

Last week, I had a session with a new client. She was very frustrated about things in her life. She had wanted to change them for so many years and nothing had happened.

“I feel like I have no control over my life”, she said to me, “It’s as if part of me says ‘go left’ and the other side says ‘go right’. For some reason, neither is the direction I want to go and I’m stuck! I can’t get the two sides of me to communicate with each other”.

I smiled. It sounded familiar.

“Sometimes, I wake up with energy and motivation that lasts for three days. There is a voice inside of me that keeps telling me it can be like this forever. I’ve tried shutting it out, but I don’t know how to”, she kept telling me about her frustration.

I listened to her and thought to myself, “She is ready for the sailing story”.

I hope you are ready too.

Two years ago, I wrote about choosing to be miserable in the The Art of Misery. It is amazing how many people in the world qualify for the Certificate of Misery and have mastered this art. For some strange reason, it is easier to master misery than happiness. I do not know exactly why that is, but for most people, the definition of happiness is so hard to achieve they can never be happy. Even when they have a happy moment, it does not last long enough to get them to the next happy moment.

In The Art of Misery, I gave 10 lessons in misery with clear instructions on how to pass each test and gradually move on to the next level. Although I wrote that only those who completed the program would be entitled to the certificate, I have discovered it is enough for people to master some of the lessons to declare themselves eligible.

In the last two years, I have had many requests to extend the misery course and I believe the time has finally come. After two years of practicing and holding your misery certificate, you are ready for the next level. Today, in the second part of the Misery Mastery “training program”, I will improve, refine and help you upgrade your skills. I will add 10 more things you can do if being just miserable is not enough and you really, really want to be extremely miserable.

What we do on a regular basis, even with little things, becomes our future.

Yes, this is a bold statement, but it is true. The main challenge is that sometimes, we may not realize that what we have just done or said came out of habit. It is easy to see that we eat the same cereal for breakfast every day. That is a simple one to spot, as is driving the same way to work, choosing a certain style of clothes and the likes.

What is much harder to detect is a particular kind of thinking. Today, I want to talk about focused, persistent, determined thinking, as opposed to scattered, carried away, wishy-washy thinking.

We have many defining moments in life, but we do not always know that they are defining, because they simply add a little, or chip away gently, to the definition of who we are. Over time, however, these tiny changes in our self-definition become a whole different person than the one we could be otherwise.

Kids are not born with organizing and planning skills and do not automatically adopt them, even if their parents are planning junkies. They need to be taught how to be organized gradually, as their mental abilities develop.

My 20-year-old daughter Eden is so organized she managed to work full time in a very demanding job, study psychology full time and get 100% and 99% on two of her university assignments. If Tsoof had to do what she did, he would not have a chance.

But…

At the age of 13, Eden could not plan ahead very well, much like most of the kids and teens I work with.

Just last term, during the school break, I discussed with my busy son Tsoof how to prepare for his last term of school. Because he is a busy kid who performs and rehearses during school hours, he misses many hours and even whole days of school.

The reason I talked to him about it was that the previous term had been too hectic and there had been mornings when he had gotten up and lacked his usual spark about going to school “Yay, today I have…” He had been nearly exhausted, so I hoped that preparing for his last term would make it easier on him.

I always say life depends on what we focus on. Our expectations are a way of focusing on what we would like the future to hold for us, which means our life depends on them.

Expectations can motivate you or hurt you and only we can determine what they will do to us. Here is it how this works.

We all have expectations, because we rely on them to make life more predictable and therefore safer and less stressful. We learn from past experiences and predict how thing will turn out.

A person without expectations is like one with very short-term memory, because he or she cannot remember how things will turn out and must re-learn life’s lessons over and over again.

When I ask my daughter for her name, I expect her to tell me the name I gave her when she was born. Every day, I get up in the morning, I expect the sun to be there (sometimes it is hidden behind the clouds, but it is still there). I expect my sister to call me on my birthday and say “Happy birthday”.

Have you ever looked at the watch again and again, only to find that 30 seconds had passed? I think humans have a real challenge with the notion of time. Time is not very consistent with the feeling of waiting for something to happen. When we are happy, time seems to fly quickly and all our attempts to freeze the moment for a bit longer result in total failure. When we are down or waiting for something to happen, it is almost as if the clock ticks in . s l o w . m o t i o n.

Feels familiar?

I think I have found the cure for this inconsistency. It is called “patience”. It is kind of a strange cure, almost like vitamins. The less we have of it in our body, the more we need it. You will be very surprised to know that just last month, I had to take large doses of my own medicine, unwillingly of course, but it helped me heal a bit. Today, I would like to share with you some insights I have learned about this medicine, which I call The P Inhaler.

I think time is one of the greatest challenges for humans. The notions of death and end affect many choices in our life. There are many things we do not do because we think they might take too long (or we might not have enough time). We believe it is essential to set our priorities, conserve our energy and choose our battles, but if we could live forever, life would be a totally fascinating ride.

Dan, one of my personal life coaches, told me about this list on the first sessions I had with him. “When I was 18, my dad sent me to an evening with a motivational speaker”, Dan said, “He told us to write down 100 things we want to do in our lifetime. I write my list and put it somewhere. When I became a life coach, I found my list again and I was amazed at how many of the things in it I had already done “.

While many people are in a constant battle to get more and more things in life, this brings with it more and more of the things they do not want. The Genie of the Universe who grants our wishes cannot separate the good from the bad and provides both. You ask for more money and the Genie gives you a promotion with more time away from your kids.