– Perseverance – How to Stop Giving Up

Do you feel like you can never accomplish your goals? You have all of these dreams and aspirations of where you want to be and what will make you happy, but always seem to give up before they come to fruition. You probably look back at all the times you have failed and believe it is because of some detrimental aspect of your personality when all along you were seeing the struggle with the wrong perspective.

Learning perseverance is possible for anyone, the trick is to radically change the way you look at your goals in the first place.

When you think about what goals you want to accomplish, whether it be to learn a new skill, get out of debt, lose weight, or even start a business, what do you focus on? Do you see the whole picture, including the massive amount of work ahead of you? This can easily lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed, creating anxiety about how much work the goal will require. Maybe you just think about the end result, and waste time drooling over the pleasure that will come from that achievement, somehow thinking that day dreaming will turn into results. Instead of these mindsets of imagination that only serve to waste the present moment or fill you with fear, set out a plan and then put all of your focus on what you can do in the present moment. This will keep you moving towards your goal and stop overwhelming your mind with details you don’t need to think about now.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

What is your mindset when you begin a new project or start work on achieving some goal? Are you excited and confident, or do you only start working towards something by focusing on all that is wrong? A mindset that is stuck on what is wrong and a preoccupation with the negative aspects in life will never create behaviors that will produce better outcomes. You can not succeed out of pure frustration of your current status.

When your motivation is focused on your lacking, you are trying to propel yourself into success out of anger and desperation, and you will never put forward your best efforts from this mindset. Instead, identify the aspect you want to change or goal you want to achieve, decide what behaviors you need to adopt in the present moment to create that outcome, and then completely drop the preoccupation with your current suffering.

Any attachment to the negative aspects or lacking in your life will only create more suffering and will constantly sap your motivation and happiness.

Next, try to re-frame how you view your goal. Do you see your goal as a burning desire, one that will give you happiness and prosperity? When you try to achieve something by putting these future predictions upon an imagined outcome, you deny yourself the ability to be happy in the present moment. Also, how terrible are you going to feel if you never accomplish your ultimate goal? Are you willing to adhere to the mindset that you will never be happy unless you achieve this goal, and that living a life of misery is your deserved status for failing? You must remember that regardless of circumstance, you can choose to be happy and at peace with life.

You can still improve your life and work towards a goal, but you must do it from a position of acceptance of the present. Happiness will never come from an imagined future success, but from your own choice mindset in the ever present moment.

Now, lets look at what happens when you give up on something. What perspective do you have that has caused you to give up? Chances are, you have hit some kind of a roadblock that makes your goal seem out of reach, or maybe this failure has triggered a validation of your poor self-esteem when it comes to your record of accomplishments. You must stop these thoughts immediately. You need to see failures as lessons, as opportunities to think of new ways of accomplishing your goal armed with knowledge you didn’t have before.

When you stop letting setbacks destroy your hope, you become more powerful than anything standing in your way.

So, next time you find yourself thinking about a goal you want to achieve, start by acknowledging that you can and will be happy regardless of the outcome, and that you go into this endeavor because it is something that will serve you. Drop your preoccupation with past failures, for motivation is not possible without first believing in yourself. Plan your actions, and then start at the beginning, always maintaining your focus on the present moment, which is the only time you can ever do anything. As you work, find ways to enjoy your efforts, even the tedious, stressful or exhausting ones. You are a thousand times more likely to stick to something when you find ways for it to give you joy even before you get results. Then, when you hit roadblocks or setback, see it as the lesson that it is, accept it, then stand back up and move forward, more prepared than ever to accomplish your goals.