A friend and I were talking recently about growing up watching ABC's Wide World of Sports on the weekends. While one mention of the line from their intro - "the thrill of victory...and the agony of defeat" - immediately brought to mind the image of a ski jumper biting it on the way down, I realized that I couldn't for the life of me remember what the accompanying clip for the thrill of victory was.
Unfortunately, a lot of people live their lives that way. They remember the failures and face plants. Sometimes they even obsess on them. But when they do something well, they scarcely pause to acknowledge it, much less remember it down the road.
When it comes to pursuing their passion, focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive can be a dream-killer. It's vital that you celebrate your success along the way. Why? Because when you focus on the negative and don't reinforce the positive...
It eats away at your self-confidence.
When you jump off the cookie cutter path and pursue a career that is uniquely right for you, it is almost by definition about taking the road less traveled. And navigating that road successfully takes self-confidence.
Dwelling on the failures and face plants along the way does anything but build self-confidence. It repeatedly sends the message, "You're not good enough. You can't do it right. When you try, you fail." Even if most of your efforts result in success, focusing on your failures is guaranteed to paint a dismal picture.
It distorts reality.
Minimizing (or ignoring) your successes and enlarging your failures distorts your picture of reality. It's like one of those fun-house mirrors that make you look short and fat or tall and skinny. And because your experience of reality is created by your perception of it, everywhere you look you see the negative element relentlessly confirmed.
It creates a falsely negative pattern.
When the majority of your attention is aimed at the face plants, that's the pattern you will see. Each failure becomes a clear confirmation that you don't have what it takes. After all, look at all these other botched efforts you can point to to back that up, right?
It numbs you to your positive achievements.
When you're not in the habit of acknowledging the positive, it takes an ultra-blast of success to get your attention. Run-of-the-mill achievements scarcely make it onto your radar screen as you turn your attention to what's next.
The more you practice acknowledging the positive, the more positive you will notice. It's a bit like when I start making an effort to remember my dreams in the morning. When I do that consistently, after a few days my brain will automatically start going over the dreams when I wake up. When I focus on remembering dreams, eventually the number of dreams I remember shoots up.
Try this: Start training your brain to acknowledge your successes, both large and small. For the next week, challenge yourself to find at least three things you did well each day. They could be work-related, or relationship-oriented, or hobby-focused, or any of a bazillion other ways you show up in life.
At the end of each day, write them down. Spend five minutes acknowledging to yourself that you did them well. Better yet, acknowledge to someone else that you did them well. Get it out of your brain and into the open.
One last idea to help you tilt the scale in the direction of a positive perception. Every time you find yourself dwelling on something you did wrong, stop yourself and ask, "OK, what have I done right today/this week/this month?" Redirect your mind and celebrate your successes.
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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams
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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst
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