Keys To A Fair SHot
It is so vital that we maintain our passion, effort, and attention to detail throughout chasing a dream. Losing any of those ingredients can be a one-way ticket to losing our momentum toward our dreams. We have to do everything in our power to ensure we do not grow weary in well-doing.
Starting a new venture is fun. There's a lot of work, preparation, and stress up front, but overall, everything is new, which makes it fun. Once that newness wears off, we are left with the work before us. And often, no matter how much we enjoy the job, it's still work. If you're anything like me, the second something starts to feel like work, you would rather be by the pool sipping mojitos.
I started my new venture last week. The presentation part was enjoyable, and the appointments are fun when they go well. But after sixteen appointments and not seeing the level of success that I was hoping for, I can feel weariness creeping up on me. And it is far too soon for those feelings to occur.
I could attribute it to multiple full days of work that I haven't done in quite a long time. I could also attribute it to the fact that we have guests coming, so much of the weekend was spent working and cleaning. Or I could attribute it to the fact that I am the mom of a toddler, which is exhausting in itself. But I really know that it happened because I let my ego get in the way, thinking I should be better at this than I had any business being.
So when it's not working at the level that I expected, then I'm faced with the option to look inward and evaluate or feel tired and quit. Now, obviously, only one of those is a reasonable choice to make. And I am blowing the scenario way out of proportion to illustrate this point better.
The reality is that when we start any new venture, we need to have clear checkpoints. Not everything we try to do will be the best move for us. We need to be able to step back and decide that this really isn't the right place. We can bow out with the dignity of knowing that we put ourselves first. We must have the clarity to decipher between something that genuinely doesn't fit us and something we aren't giving a real chance.
I played a lot of sports growing up. By that, I mean multiple years of soccer when I was a very young child who was scared of the ball. I also did a few years of basketball, a few lessons in tennis, and a couple of years of swimming. I walked away from it when it got too hard or wasn't fun anymore. Now, that was fine because those weren't my dreams. They were never more than hobbies, and I didn't have grand ambitions for them, although I do wish I had stuck with swimming longer.
I can't treat my dreams like those athletic activities. I can't quit when things get hard (even if my definition of hard in soccer was having to be in the same half of the field as the ball). I have to give myself and these things a fair shot. In the traditional sales model of our insurance business, we have the rule of 15. We can't begin to judge anyone's sales abilities until they've done at least 15 appointments purely because we don't have a big enough sample size.
Why should I treat this or myself any differently? I do not have to be an expert from the get-go. I don't even need to be a superstar. My dream doesn't demand that. Instead, it asks that I try my best. It asks me to fight for it. It asks me to keep showing up and give myself a fair shot.
Having good exit points preplanned before starting a new venture is an excellent idea because it gives us hard points to evaluate and doesn't allow us to quit on a bad day. I planned to do two cycles of this venture before I decided whether it was right for me to keep moving forward. I made that decision with the intention and knowledge that I would need a learning curve. Having one lousy set wouldn't be a good enough representation of what I was capable of or what this would be able to provide for me.
Clear mile markers may not be enough if we are just dragging our feet to get there. We have to find ways to maintain the passion that brought us into this to begin with. We may have loved the work, or we may have loved what the work provided us. Either way, we must keep that love alive and in front of us.
We need to maintain our effort levels. More often than not, people get off track because they just dial back the effort slightly after a bad day. But lower effort usually creates worse results, so we have another bad day and dial back the effort even more. It is a vicious cycle that we can avoid by committing our energy to performing at a high level every day.
Finally, we have to pay attention to detail. When we start something new, we have to
monitor every item on the checklist because we don't know it very well yet. As we get more familiar, we can start to drop the detail-oriented aspects, especially if we think they are superfluous to the agenda. The details are there for a reason, though, and if we stop doing too many, we can notice some pretty significant cracks in the foundation.
Letting up in any of those categories means that we aren't giving our new things a fair shot. And we aren't giving ourselves time to actually see what we can do. It would be great to be a prodigy at everything, but that just isn't the case for most of us. We must give ourselves time and trust the process to hone our skills. I'm preaching to myself today. Today wasn't bad, and things have actually been on par with what I should have expected. But I wasn't a superstar right off the bat, and that was disappointing to find out. Today was simply a reminder that I am on the right track, and I need to maintain my passion, effort, and attention to detail because my exit ramp is a long way off.