2/17/09 – Letting go of Convenience

Reaching the pinnacle of most professions and pursuits is not really about overcoming failure. Being average and finishing the race is about overcoming failure. But taking life to the next level is more about understanding one simple concept which is that:

The pain of discipline is much less than the pain of regret.

One of my recent articles talks about living a 5 Star Life in 6 different areas: Faith, Family, Fitness, Fun, Faculty, and Finances. And getting to the next level in anything requires that you have to make sacrifices. In other words you have to let go of something that you have been mentally holding onto.

Please don’t confuse letting go of mental barriers as the same as giving up something that you’re striving for. For example, in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker talks about in one of his “Wealth Files” how rich people always think in terms of both; i.e., they have figured out that you can have both time and money. Or that you can have both faith and money. I’m not saying that you have to give up one pursuit in order to achieve another, because you can have both.

However, what I have noticed that limits most of us from reaching our potential is that there are certain mental barriers that shelter our growth. In fact many of us have self sabotaging beliefs (often subconscious) that we allow ourselves to keep because, believe it or not, there is a Payoff to having those self imposed restrictions. The two most prevalent Payoffs that I am seeing are convenience and comfort.

Did you know that for many of us there is a Payoff to not hitting goals that stretch us? And often that Payoff is a stronger incentive for us to maintain our current level of performance than is the incentive to break through to a new higher level of performance. Many of us live in cycles where we appear to be pursuing greater performance, maybe we even say that we want to reach the next level, and perhaps we even have our goals written down somewhere, yet truthfully there is a bigger Payoff that we experience that comes as the result of falling short of our alleged goals. Again, it is the Payoff of convenience and comfort.

I have met many people who subconsciously allow themselves to be thrown off track in their pursuits because that guarantees failure and failure allows them to prove the story they have about themselves that they are always the victim. There is a payoff to always being the victim. Because if you always get to be the victim, then you never have to succeed. You never have to put in the work, the focus, the passion, and the discipline to succeed. You see there is a risk to success, and the risk is that it’s new. It’s different. It’s uncomfortable. And sometimes guaranteed failure is easier to pursue than uncertain success. And once we’ve failed enough times it becomes comfortable.

We learn to grow accustomed to “the way we’ve always been” and the more and more familiar it gets the easier it is to surrender at the first sign of challenge than to meet challenges head on that we know we could defeat. Have you ever heard of someone who lost a lot of weight, only to put it right back on? Often times it’s because once they start to reach a certain level of success it becomes uncomfortable to them; it’s unfamiliar. And maintaining that level requires a new lifestyle of choices and habits that are outside their range of familiarity. It signals to them that they are entering new territory, beginning a new life – which is one that they may not know how to deal with because it is new.

Breaking out of your M.O. (modus operandi) of the way you’ve always been doesn’t take special secrets, potent pills, or magical medicine.

What it takes is letting go of convenience.

It takes a conscious, deliberate, intentional decision to be made that you are willing to start being uncomfortable and that you are willing to do things that are inconvenient. Inconvenience might mean getting up early, staying a little longer, working a little harder, working a little smarter, or an infinite number of other sacrifices. Being willing to be inconvenienced means that you have to Take The Stairs. You have to do things now that you’ve never wanted to do in the past. You have to become uncomfortable if you’re going to become a different person. If you’re not hitting or maintaining your goals ask yourself, “what Payoff am I getting from keeping the status quo?”

There is a technique that can help you overcome these self defeating cycles and it’s called the Teeter Totter of Pain. Tune in soon to learn about how to manage the pain of discipline so that it becomes less than the pain of regret.

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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