What's Your Interference?
This may be a slap in the face for some. Listen for the lame reasons and excuses you invent when I ask you why haven’t you already achieved your goals?
“I’m too busy.” “Dream on, some of us have to work”. “It’s alright for them, I wasn’t born with rich parents”. The list is endless and I know because I’ve used them all.
I know every excuse there is because I've used them all.
My question is what’s REALLY stopped you from getting to where you want to be in life? What makes you so different to everyone else who has had real and lasting success? Are you less talented? Do you not have access to the same resources? Are you physically or mentally disabled (and I can show you PLENTY of stories how that hasn't affected amazing success!)?
We don't ask ourselves the tough questions often enough, and if we do, we sugar-coat the answers and play a malicious Blame Game that offloads our personal responsibility in the face of outside influences and circumstances. We choose to take things as they are, assuming that’s the hand life has dealt us, rather than questioning how we can go about doing things differently. If you think you don't have a choice in the life you lead, you're dead in the water.
P = Po -I
Tim Gallwey in his book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’, talks about a person’s performance being their potential minus the interference that gets in the way. Everyone has the potential to be more than their current experience, but we have ‘stuff’ that gets in the way. We're programmed to want more from life as individuals (despite you thinking he or she is a no-hoper without real vision or goals), but our thinking and behavioural 'stuff' gets in the way. Our job is to figure out what that is, and do our best to decrease its power, or eliminate it from our life.
Sometimes our interference is physical – our actions are misdirected or misaligned to our goals, or it’s mental – our thinking is unhelpful and it’s like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on.
Our interferences are like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on.
Here's a couple of simple things you can do to weed out interferences in your life sooner rather than later:
- Take time to self-reflect. I used to think sitting with your thoughts was the realm of the narcissist or outpatient. What I've come to know is awareness is king. Take a good hard look at what we’re doing right now to move your life forward. Are you caught in your own version of Groundhog Day? If one week is the same as the last (yet alone one year!), then it's time to start rocking the apple cart. You don't need to have an affair or buy a Harley to create change in your life (one out of two for me....I ride a Harley) - just do SOMETHING you wouldn't normally do that you'd consider a stretch for your normal (boring) self. If you're now thinking, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", then I rest my case. Expect to be doing what you're doing (and nothing more) in the future, until the law of diminishing returns takes hold and the world passes you by.
Self- reflection increases self-awareness, so taking time to evaluate your thoughts and actions in the day is a good starting point for getting our task balance sheets right. Literally get a piece of paper and draw two columns – one for positive thoughts and actions and the other for negative. Write down the time each happened in the day and what your thoughts or actions were about, or the result of. You'll be surprised at how unbalanced our thinking and actions are, moving us away from our goals. Re-balance your list.
2. Be brutally honest with yourself. There can be no excuses in weeding out interferences. They might seem like a great idea at the time, or the easiest course of action at a given point, but if they’re not moving you closer to your goals and realising potential, then they must be minimised if unproductive, or banished if harmful. If we can avoid, procrastinate, rationalise and compensate, we’ll give it our best shot before taking the plunge in doing what is necessary. We have to reverse that trend, replacing the old with what is new and necessary.
If we can avoid, procrastinate, rationalise and compensate, we’ll give it our best shot.
The number one thing people complain of when spewing excuses on why they haven’t done the work yet is not having enough time. “I just don’t have enough time for me”, or “I haven’t even started because I’ve been really busy”. Here's a fact - ‘busy-ness’ is not an end destination in itself. It’s an interference we create by filling our time with things that make us short-term happy, but long-term unsatisfied. Using ‘busy-ness’ as an excuse to not move from our status quo is a cop out. Why? Because most of our interferences are self-imposed and cause us to waste time doing useless things that aren’t important. It’s these actions that hijack our success because we fill our time doing the wrong things.
Every day we perform tasks that fill our day. Pareto’s Rule states that we spend roughly 80% of our time doing 20% of our tasks. With so many activities to perform in our increasingly busy lives, it’s difficult to know what to work on.
3. Prioritise, because not all tasks are created equally. The first question we need to ask is, are our tasks maintenance or progress tasks? A maintenance task is one where after having done it, we’re still in exactly the same position in terms of our goals, whereas progress tasks move us directly towards getting what we want. For example, spending your whole day doing chores around the house – mowing the lawns, vacuuming the carpets, and picking up the dry cleaning are all things that probably need to be done, but they won’t help you progress. Making a phone call to a prospective client, studying for an exam to help you enter university, or joining a boot camp if you have a weight-loss goal, would be considered helpful and important in moving you in the right direction once completed. They are progressing you towards future success.
Once you’ve figured out what are maintenance and progress tasks, we can prioritise, making our approach proactive rather than reactive. If the amount of surprises you had in your day were decreased because you planned better, imagine how much more you could achieve. Those time-wasting activities would disappear almost immediately. Fail to plan equals plan to fail, so spending time to get your priority list right for you is vital.
It's important to remember we create our own interferences that hold us back. We get caught in fail cycles by convincing ourselves that things are different for us, that nobody else could possibly understand the uniqueness of our situation, and that despite having tried it all before, nothing has worked. Our interferences start in the mind, but affect our outward actions and behaviour (or lack thereof). We need to take the same brutal analysis and realise that some of the limiting beliefs we hold onto need to be questioned if we’re going to become unstuck.
Whether your interference lay in your physical actions, or your mindset, one thing we know is that things rarely get more appealing with time. Your time is now, so without further adieu, take a look at your day, your actions and thoughts within that day, and assess how we might organise them to minimise interferences affecting performance.
Go forth!
For more information on my Keynote Speaking, Corporate Workshops, Coaching or LIFEHACK X-PERIENCE 30-day program, message me on LinkedIn or contact me via my website www.gregsellar.com