Here’s something which you might have had happen to you.

You set out to achieve something, but then constantly feel that something is lacking in your life. Even when the goal is reached, the sense of satisfaction still eludes you. Even worse is when you set a goal but then can’t seem to find the motivation to move towards it. No matter how much you try, there just doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for making progress. Then you start to question why you don’t have any motivation, and maybe begin to think that it’s just because you are lazy or lack drive.

There might be some truth in that, though truly lazy people often are too lazy to even think that they might be lazy. The problem is often not that you are lazy, but simply that the goal isn’t one that you really want to achieve. You might have chosen a goal that someone else wants to achieve.

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When was the last time you planned to do something and then didn’t do it because you thought the time wasn’t right? Or you thought of doing something but then put it off because some other conditions weren’t right—you were in the wrong place, or you had something else to get out of the way before you started on something new? Chances are you shelved that plan for a while, and the while got a little longer, and one day you realized that months or even years had gone by without anything being achieved.

The fact is it’s easy to make excuses for not doing something, and the general excuse that “the time is not right” or that you are in the wrong place is one of the easiest one there is. It enables you to make an excuse without actually pinpointing the excuse. It’s vague, and allows you to let time slip by without giving it much thought.

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One of the things we hear often—and especially from ourselves—is that all the courses of action open to us are unsatisfactory. Usually there are just one or two possible solutions to a problem, and none of them are really solutions. They’re just different versions of the same thing. We want to earn more money, but all the job opportunities in our field are much the same as the one we have now. We want more time to ourselves, but that would mean taking a job with lower pay… and we can’t afford to take a drop in income right now. In fact, we really need more income, not less. We look at the schools available for our children in our local area, and find that none of them are satisfactory.

In all parts of our life, it seems that there are few courses of action open to us. And the simple reason is that we’re not thinking broadly enough.

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Change is one of those things that causes a lot of anxiety to a lot of people. The fear of change stops us from achieving things, and sweeps away our motivation. Is there a way around it? It all depends on the way you think of change. And what it means to keep things the same.

Who hasn’t experienced this kind of situation?

You feel that life isn’t going exactly how you want it to go. Maybe your life isn’t going at all how you want it to go. Sometimes your feelings border on desperation. Desperate to lose weight… Desperate to change jobs… Desperate to improve your health… So you make up your mind to change your life for the better. You make plans.

But no matter how much you try, you can’t seem to make a start to move from your old ways. You might even make a few steps in the right direction. You may even feel pleased that you’re making progress toward change. And then a weird thing happens. The more you move toward your goal, the new life you’ve imagined for yourself, the more you seem to be drawn back to the old ways.
 
You try to lose weight, and things seems to be going fine, but you miss the great feeling you got by eating whatever you want and soon you’re back to the old ways of eating junk food and sitting around instead of exercising. You try to stop smoking, and make some steps toward reaching your goal, but miss the great feeling of indulging in cigarettes, and slip back into the old ways of puffing on the evil weed. You desperately want to change your job, so you begin to look around for other openings, maybe even send off a few letters of application. But when no suitable job offers arrive immediately—which is usually the case—you start to rationalize that the place you’re in isn’t such a bad old company after all, and before you know it another year—or ten years—has slipped by and you’re still there, still complaining to your partner about the long hours, the difficulties of dealing with your boss and wondering where the time went to.

Why is this? Why do we slip back to our old ways so easily?

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One of the biggest obstacles to our progress can be that we compare ourselves to others too much. We look at people who are successful—or at least more successful than we are—and feel that to do the same would require an effort that we just aren’t capable of. We look at people with apparently more talent or skill than we have, and feel that it’s impossible for us to achieve the same.

But this is to underestimate our own strength and the ability to make a difference in our own lives. We need to realize that we may not have had the same success, but are successful in our own way. We need to realize that we may not have the same talent or skill, but have our own talents and skills which we can use to great effect in our own lives.

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