Your desk is piled with papers, you’re getting a new email every 2 minutes, everyone is pulling for your attention, and personal tasks keep piling up in your mind. How do you manage it all so you don’t go crazy but do make progress? One step at a time.
Over the Memorial Day holiday, I began a big project which reminded me of the importance of working steadily to accomplish your goals.
See, often we’re sold on the dream. The million dollar a year business, a beautiful and comfortable home, that perfect beach body or the smooth launch campaign. And we want that so badly that we jump in with both feet and tackle the project with ye-haw! and ‘this is awesome yo!’
But invariably there’s a little bump in the road, or many bumps, and it’s your choice to keep on rolling or get off track entirely. In my experience there are 5 stages to go through:
Stage 1 is the excitement stage. This is when your emotions are high and your joy cannot be contained. For me it was picking up the crowbar and going in to demo my bathroom floor. Yes! You think, finally this project is happening!
It’s a stage when you imagine everything will go right and it’s very hard to hear when someone is warning you otherwise. All you want to do is execute the plan because you have so much energy. So you do, and that brings you to stage 2.
Stage 2 is the ease stage, everything is going well and spirits are high. For me this lasted for 2 tiles. The first 2 came up with no trouble, almost as if they hadn’t even been glued down (note the foreshadowing). This is SO easy, you think, I should have done this years ago.
It’s easy to get caught up at this stage. After all, you’re not actually being tested, but the duration of this stage will vary. Sometimes it lasts for weeks or months. But it cannot last forever because life isn’t perfect. On occasion the only thing that ends this stage is boredom because while things go smoothly, it’s no longer fun.
Stage 3 is disruption. Something will go wrong, or not even wrong but delayed, unexpected, off the plan. It could be a welcome change like 40 new clients in one week or an unwelcome change like ‘under the tile is another layer of tile even harder to get off.’
How you respond in this stage will make all the difference to your success. You may rant, cry, shake your fist, curse, meditate, pray, mope, plan, replan or power through. Maybe even all of those things. When things don’t go as planned we want to blame ourselves, and often we feel ill-prepared or stupid. But it’s only a test of your determination, so if you commit to moving forward one step at a time, then stage 4 is when things turn around.
Stage 4 is determination. The rose colored glasses are off and you might even look at this project warily thinking of all the problems that might come up. If you have the determination, then it’s time to keep working and tackle things one step at a time.
It means picking up one piece of paper from the pile and putting it away. Answering one email and archiving it. Taking out one tile at a time even when you’re wondering who had this bright idea in the first place!
Finally Stage 5 is appreciation. Once you look back at the bumps in the road and reach your goal, the results are much sweeter when you know all that went into getting there. It’s hard because this is the point where people come along and say how ‘easy’ it must have been for your ‘overnight success.’ Don’t slap them, okay? It’s not nice.
If you’ve powered through all the struggles and hard times, then this appreciation will be much deeper. When you’re in the middle of it all, it can be hard to think about appreciation so appreciate every single step. Each time I got out another tile, a strip of paper glued to the subfloor, a baseboard section was cause for celebration.
You don’t need to be finished to appreciate all the hard work that you’re doing, because most of the time once you hit stage 5 you’re right back to the ease stage (until the next problem arises). How quickly you get out of whining mode and back to work is entirely up to you.
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