Motivation

Not Making Progress Fast Enough

By  | 

One of the main reasons people quit their endeavors before achieving what they set out to do is that they don’t believe they’re making progress fast enough, they’re not as far along as they think they should be.

This sort of thinking is often a protective mechanism meant to preserve the idealized self-image in the face of evidence threatening to topple it over. At the unconscious level it comes down to a choice between abandoning the endeavor and maintaining the idealized self-image or sticking with the endeavor and abandoning the idealized self-image. It’s easier to choose option number one and that’s what a lot of people do, they come up with some rationalization to justify why they’re quitting and then go about their lives confident in their superior talents and abilities since there are no longer any inputs from the environment to cast doubt on these perceived talents and abilities.

The only solution that makes any sense if you find yourself in this position is to stop focusing on where you think you should be and start focusing on giving everything you have to where you are. Improvement doesn’t happen all at once but it also doesn’t always happen in a smooth upward curve, there are often ‘aha!’ moments along the way, bursts of progress where people suddenly put it all together and make great strides. Things might be moving slower than you would like right now but you never know when that great leap forward is going to occur. If you quit it never will.

There are many factors outside of your control but what you can control is sticking with what you’re doing and giving your maximum effort. If you do these things you can consider the journey a success regardless of the outcome. Much better to struggle towards actual talents and abilities, even if they’re not what you thought or hoped they were, than to live in a fantasy world where you never find out what you’re really capable of but fool yourself into thinking you did.

Related posts:

  1. Neurotic Pride There is a type of person you may have come across who finds it really difficult to recognize the talents and abilities of others, especially when they exceed their own talents and abilities. For example, an aspiring musician might go to a rock concert with some friends, and afterwards when they ask him about the […]...
  2. Feeling The Need To Prove Yourself To Others Feeling the need to prove yourself to others is directly proportional to how much you have proven to yourself. In other words, if you’re sure of your own talents, abilities, and accomplishments others’ opinions won’t matter to you much but if you’re secretly unsure of your talents, abilities, and accomplishments these opinions will matter to […]...
  3. Preoccupied With Life Changes “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers The paradox about life changes is that when you are too preoccupied with them happening you actually get in your own way, stunting your growth and making the changes you desire less likely to happen. Of course if you don’t think […]...
  4. Let Intentions Carry More Weight Than Feelings When making important life changes we can think of our underlying intentions as the foundation upon which the house of change is built. Just as a house will collapse without a solid foundation the process of change will collapse without solid intentions. Those intentions emanate from increased conscious awareness around why, how, and what. Why […]...
  5. Keep Going People usually begin pursuing a new interest with high hopes and aspirations. You are not going to find too many people starting out who believe from the get go that they are going to quit. But this is exactly what happens all the time, and many spend their entire lives bouncing from one new interest […]...
  6. Why People Plateau It’s true that there are limits to natural abilities and going too far beyond these limits is difficult, but it’s also true that most people never come close to reaching their full potential. We’re going to use some existential and behavioral ideas to show why people plateau, and show how a simple change in philosophy […]...
  7. Developing Talent Have you ever played one of those RPG games where you start out choosing one of the available characters and then assign a pool of points to his or her various attributes? You might have to decide amongst being a wizard, knight, or archer, for example. Then you have the choice to increase his skill […]...
  8. Progress When Subtracting Behaviors When you’re trying to change your life it usually means either adding behaviors you want that weren’t there before or subtracting  behaviors you don’t want that were there before. Both routes present their own challenges, changing customary patterns of behavior is always hard. But at least when you’re adding behaviors you have something obvious to […]...
  9. Hatred Is Like Fast Food Hatred is like fast food. Fast food tastes really good while you’re ingesting it but there’s no real nutrition there, and if you eat too much of it for too long you end up facing serious health consequences. So it’s a short-term gratifier with long-term disastrous effects. Hatred is the same way. We hate because we […]...
  10. Progress Progress over the last two thousand years has been marked by human ingenuity. Mankind has developed increasingly complex technologies to help assist in the problems of work and living. Whether we are talking about the invention of the wheel or the invention of the computer, technological progress has traditionally imbued humans with a sense of […]...
  11. Be Happy With Your Progress What you see a lot with people who are making life changes, where they are working towards a difficult goal, is that they make significant progress but instead of praising themselves they get down on themselves for not being far enough along. If this happens to you, you’ve got to find a way to take […]...
  12. Stop Complaining and Start Making a Plan Many are deeply unhappy in their lives but experience a tremendous amount of inertia. Some of that inertia is justified in that sometimes our external environments won’t support an immediate drastic change. For example, maybe you despise your job, but quitting right now without a backup plan might not be financially feasible. The problem though […]...
  13. Making Reparations Some spend a significant portion of their lives holding on to painful feelings of regret about the state of their relationship with someone important to them. They want to make reparations, to say they’re sorry, but they don’t know how. They are afraid of receiving a negative response, of putting themselves out there only to […]...
  14. Making Do With What You Have There is a psychological trap a lot of people fall into that causes them to squander the precious time they could be using productively.  But they wallow, they feel frustrated and angry instead. They do nothing but stew. This trap is that when environmental conditions suddenly change so that routine behaviors are interrupted, so that […]...
  15. Making Sense of Divorce When a person tries to make sense of the wreckage of a ruined relationship, the word counselors hear all the time is ‘failure’. There is usually more than enough blame to go around. Depending on the constitution of the person in question, blame will either focus on what he or she could have done differently, […]...
  16. Putting Off Making A Decision Rationalizations block human growth because they let us off the hook from seeing the truth; they are the more desirable alternative explanation that, while seeming to protect us psychologically and emotionally, end up causing us more damage because our lives become fraudulent. In the context of important life decisions, an effective rationalization that many people […]...
  17. If Someone You Care About Is Making You Suffer If you’ve begun to feel that someone you care about is making you suffer then it’s virtually guaranteed that this person is suffering too. None of us are naturally very good at handling our own suffering. We seek to escape it through all the psychological defense mechanisms at our disposal, through repression, projection, and rationalizations. […]...
  18. Suicide And Making Others Suffer People who are suicidal are engaged in a variety of faulty thinking patterns. A common one we want to discuss here is the idea that killing yourself will be an effective way to punish those who have caused you pain. The plan is sort of like jumping on a grenade except there’s nothing noble about […]...
  19. Making Connections And Perception An open, friendly attitude is usually pretty easy to cultivate for people when they’re within their comfort zone. A big part of this comfort zone is already having good friends and acquaintances when they meet new people. There’s a certain sense of power, of feeling bigger, that comes from knowing in the back of your […]...
  20. Worried About Making A Good Impression Most people, when entering into new social situations, are really worried about making a good impression when what they should be worried about is being themselves. From the group development standpoint trying to make a good impression is pseudo-community, it’s putting up a false front that hinders rather than helps authentic human connection since what’s […]...
Related Items