The Success Mirage that Makes You Fail, Spectacularly - Is This You?

If you have ever tried to get better results in any area of your life or business, you probably have experienced the success mirage and, in some cases, failed spectacularly as a result. In this article, I want to discuss what it is and how to avoid it and offer 3 steps to success.

How do you achieve better results?

The results that you have today is a manifestation of your thoughts, decisions and actions. It is as simple as that.

To have different results, you have to change all three. Your thoughts, decisions, and actions you take all have to change. That is why getting different results is so damn tricky.

An example from my own life.

Have you ever read the book The 12 Week Year? A brilliant approach to reaching new goals. Instead of seeing the year as 12 months, you see your goals in 12 weeks, every quarter. You double and even triple your results super fast. However, you have to do this work with a buddy to keep you accountable and analyse the actions in my experience.

Over the years, I have had many accountability buddies. I will teach them the process, and then we start the 12-week journey. Like most other small business owners, most of them face one thing, a dry sales pipeline, and that is the thing they try to fix using the 12-week process.

Accountability buddies have to check in with each other every day and a more extended session once a week. 

Week 1, they start the process with me, and nothing changes much. Week 2, they start having conversations with potential customers, and by week 4, they have regular sales meetings and proposals out. By week 6, they start getting orders, and they get busy. 

Week 8 and onwards, slowly but surely, they start to miss accountability check-ins and a week or so later, they disappear from the radar, busy to get stuff done. The results is we do not work together as buddies anymore.

Back to where they started

Not long after that, we will have a chat again, and they will suffer the same issue they had those weeks ago, a dry pipeline. Despite the work and the effort, they were back where they started.

What you saw in the example is the success mirage. You start changing your thinking, decisions at the moment and your daily actions, and seeing results. As soon as the results grow, you think you are safe, and you revert to your old habits, thinking you will maintain this wave of success.

But because you did not make these changes long enough, you never internalised it, and it made it part of a new you. The old you was still hiding in the back, ready to jump in and do what it has always done, and get the results it has always given you.

The success was a mirage, and you thought it was real. 

What do better results ask of you?

To have different results means you have to become a different person. When you make the rights changes in your thinking, decision-making, and actions, you can quickly see good results. However, the success you have there is simply a mirage; it is not real because it is just you acting differently for a few weeks.

To see and taste the real oasis of success, you have to stick it out, as uncomfortable as it may be, until you become that new person. 

I have seen this happen in my life many times. I used the example of accountability buddies, but I have experienced this in all areas of life and business that I wanted to improve. 

3 Steps to success

Getting better results will be hard; if it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and you would probably already have the results you want.

#1. Bite-sized

Make small changes instead of big ones. If there is a big change you want, then do it in small changes. Break it into 5 or even 10 small changes. Yes, it will take longer, and I hear you say, “Willem, I do not have the time” well, it is either this or nothing? 

Would you like to have the results eventually or just never? It will be challenging even when you break it down into smaller changes, do not fool yourself. 

#2. It is ok to give up

If you are struggling for a long time to make the needed change and just not getting it right, STOP, give up on it. Do another change and get results in other areas and come back to this one. 

Three things will happen when you get back to it. It will still be challenging as hell, and you have to walk away from it again. Or it is easier because you become more resilient and stronger by doing other changes, and now you can face this. Lastly, it might not be relevant anymore, or you have achieved the change already because of changes you made in other areas of your life and business.

#3. Remove the massive roadblocks

Some of these changes have deep underlying beliefs that might keep you from ever making that change. From work I do with my coach and the coaching work I do with other business owners, I know for a fact, our own beliefs are the things that keep us from making the changes to get the results we want. 

Do this work with a coach like me and make sure you have a higher chance of making the change and getting the results you want while probably saving a lot of time and money in the process.

I am serious about what I want to achieve and doing the work. Are you serious about getting the results you want? Let me know at [email protected]