Competition?  Promise of peace?  Driven by passion? etc.  I still remember when I consciously started doing better in school.  I was a junior in high school (yeah, we can’t all be early bloomers), and I sat next to Jeff Gardner.  We were in social studies class together where I had already determined I was going to struggle through and hope for a B instead of a C.
One day we had just gotten our tests back.  I looked at the seventy-three percent with a sinking feeling.  Here I was going down the path of hardship and misery again.  How many more years of school did I have left?  I was calculating the answer when Jeff leaned over to my desk and looked at my test.
I quickly turned the test over, but the damage had been done.  He had seen it.
“Having a bad day?” he asked.
“What?” I asked, confused that he was even talking to me.  He was in the goody-good-guy-group and a wrestler—not really the type of person who talked to me.
“Your test. That’s not a very good score, and the test was easy.  See,” he said, holding up his test with a big juicy red A splattered across it.  “That score isn’t like you. You always do better.  So, are you having a bad day?”
I agreed, not knowing what else to say. Having a bad grade wasn’t like me? What was he saying? It was totally like me, but I wasn’t going to argue. I would let him believe his positive lie about me.
The teacher interrupted us to give us our assignments. We had a quiz to study for the next day.
Jeff turned to me and smiled. “I’ll kick your butt tomorrow on that quiz. You’re going down, Jones.”
My shoulders squared as I gathered my books.  “Not a chance,” I said with conviction.  And I didn’t go down.  I scored close to him.  It took a few more quizzes for me to outdo him.  Then the competition spread to other classes we had together.  I wasn’t going to let some “wrestler boy” take me down.  I had a cause. I had a mission.  I was pulling good grades.
The semester after that, I hit the straight A list.  I had done what many people thought would be impossible for me—including myself.  Why?  Because I was challenged by some boy?  Because someone told me it wasn’t like me to pull bad grades?  Well, yeah.
We can have self defeat pull us down, like I did for years.  I pulled the cloud of feeling inferior and inadequate over me because my grades weren’t measuring up.  One boy.  One competition completely changed my academic life.  Why?  Because I rose to the challenge.  I could have blown him off, but truthfully, I was too proud for that.  Going head-to-head with a boy and proving the worth of my gender worked for me.
What will work for you?  Maybe you are not as furiously competitive as I am, but what could you put in your environment that would change the whole way you approach your “hard” task?  What would give you the leverage to get what you want?
“Decide not to turn back” scenario.
Sometimes it’s not “other people” that give me the leverage to go for the BHAG (Big Hair Audacious Goal).  Sometimes it is as simple as deciding that such-and-such is simply what I am going to do.  That might sound too easy, but it really isn’t.  You not only have to decide what you want, but you have to decide that you have the abilities to get or accomplish what you want.
I was amazed how I put down a goal to be a NSA (National Speaker Association) speaker for years.  In order to qualify as a speaker, I needed fifteen paid engagements.  Year after year that goal seemed impossible to accomplish—until one year, through working with a friend, I realized that I really wanted it.  So I sat down and made a plan on how I would make it happen.  The plan wasn’t the normal way most speakers approach this task.  I skirted the traditional method, and in five months I easily accomplished what I wasn’t able to accomplish for the past two years.  Was it that my talent was better?  Well, of course I had gotten better from all the experience those years gave me. But I know that wasn’t what made the difference.
Was it that this particular year was a better time to be hired to speak?  Actually, no.  It was a down market—worse than many speakers had seen.  So what was it that made me successful?  And what will you apply in your life to make you succeed with your big goals?
Ready?  Drum roll.  It was that I believed that year that I could do it.  I sat down and came up with a plan.  I followed the plan.  I worked hard—really, really, really hard. I got a couple of lucky breaks, and voila, I did it.
For most things it is really no more difficult than that.  When you cut off all excuses or options but to succeed, it is amazing.  You don’t have time to wallow around in misery.  You have to get going and do what is set before you.  If I would have continued to feel sorry for myself, or accepted the fact that I wasn’t earning a good grade, would I have the experience of achieving a higher test score than Jeff?  Not a chance.  The only way I was able to accomplish a task that was challenging for me was to focus all my energy on doing what I needed to do.
*If you gave a single focus to your BHAG, how would your experience change?
*How would the results change?
*How might that benefit your life?
*If it would be a big change, when are you going to implement that task?

*What excuses are you using to not get going and stepping it up?*Or if it is not an excuse, what is the obstacle, and how can you work around it?

Posted in: Self Improvement, Step It Up Living at 11:45 am