Keeping Goals In Focus…..(II): How to manage discomfort and setbacks

Keeping Goals In Focus…..(II): How to manage discomfort and setbacks

 “It is good to dream and have goals, but the greatest gift a man can give himself is the execution of his goals!”

One of the distinguishing attributes of successful people is their ability to manage pains and setbacks while journeying towards their dream. Even though they face the same daunting challenges everybody else faces, they always find a way to realize their dreams. They feel what we all feel and complain like most people do, but they never give up. From great inventors to renowned singers; politicians to business tycoons, the same human story of triumph over hardship is told again and again. The question is what is the secret of sticking it out with a vision till it succeeds? What is the mind technique that makes one man win in the pursuit of his dreams, while others fail?
Here’s the answer……

Successful people view pains as the passage way or the passports to their dreams! They see the hardship encountered in the process of executing their goals as their “window of escape” to a better life. They just don’t feel and resist pains as most people do; they accept them as necessary to victory. The more they focus on this positive interpretation of their pains, the less difficult the task before them gets and the easier they achieve their goals! Fact is, a positive viewing of the discomfort experienced while undergoing a task takes the sting from that difficulty, helps one persist further and ultimately achieve the goal. How you choose to “see” what you are going through determines how far you will go in life. If you feel sad, complain and resist the temporary hardship on the way to your dreams, you will ultimately fail. But if you accept the discomfort as a necessary evil, the only way to your freedom, you will find the pain bearable and succeed!

Let me tell you a short Spanish myth that thought me a great lesson in this regard….

In the 1600s a group of Spanish adventurers travelled through the Amazon forest where one of them took seriously ill. They suspected he had been bitten by mosquitoes and was struck by the dreaded malaria plague, a sickness for which there was no cure then. He had fever, could hardly walk and day by day he became frailer. There came the time when the other travelers could carry him no more and he was left to die under a tree with nothing but a bowl of water to drink. For a few days he laid there underneath the tree, helplessly sick and just waiting to die. There was no food and the water to quench his thirst was bitterer than anything he had tasted before! On close examination, he saw that his bowl of water was full of leaves and dirt that fell from the tree and was becoming rotten.  He turned from the water in despair, “This water will kill me faster than the plague itself” he thought, and so refused to drink.

 Two Days later, with no energy left to even breathe and his fever burning high, he forced some of what was left of the rotten water down his patched throat. The only thing that mattered then was to keep alive. So he drank a little from the rotten water again, and then again. After some hours he noticed something strange, the more he drank the bitter rotten water, the better he felt! Without much thinking, he put two and two together; the leaves of the tree under which he was left to die actually cured him. And he drank of the bitter, rotten smelly substance till he was whole again!

 Like the adventurer left to die, take more of the bitter water of your experience. Accept that to realize your goal or have what you’re aiming for, there will be some discomfort to your person. Like all winners, see whatever pain you are going through as your ticket to a better life. See it as your survival kit, what will help cure the old and grow the new. See the preparation and studying hard for that interview as an open cheque to increase your income. View the pains of bodily exercise and the hunger pang from dieting as your opportunity to a healthy life and an attractive body. Interpret the rejection of your new product as mere feedback and your avenue to wealth. Visualize discomfort and rejection felt right now as the bitter pills necessary to cure a terminal sickness of lack or fear in your life! Once your mind accepts that the pain is a welcome development; everything else falls into place, and you’ll be living the life of your dreams!

“Convert difficulties into opportunities, for difficulties are divine surgeries to make you better.”  ~ Unknown