All of us know about the idea of persistence but it’s no use if we persist in doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results each time. Einstein defined that course of action as insanity.
A critical subcomponent of persistence is getting in the habit of changing your approach when you find yourself having to overcome problems and I know that’s something pretty obvious but a lot of people fail to go down this path and because of that, it becomes so easy for them to quit. They fail to go down this path because they don’t know what other approach to try as they can’t come up with any ideas or worse yet, they do know what approach they should try but don’t go through with it because of fear of failure.
Changing your approach when you’re stuck with a problem is always a good habit to build. It’s like chipping away at a piece of marble in order to create the perfect sculpture. You chip away a little bit here and a little bit there and over time, that amorphous piece of marble begins to slowly turn into the image you have in your mind. If you chipped away at the same spot of marble, all you’ll do is split it in two. Nothing would ever be created.
Not knowing what other approach to try has got to be the most obvious problem when it comes to changing approaches. You’d like to do it, but you have no idea what to do or where to start.
The obvious answer to this dilemma is to exercise your creativity. It drives the entire process and will help you look at things from different angles, help you come up with innovate ideas, and make you explore territory that you never would have thought of doing before.
BUT before you engage your creativity to think of new ways to change your approach, you must exercise and demonstrate the belief that there IS and MUST be another approach and this is so crucial. Why? Only then will your mind go on to solve the problem because if you cannot make your conscious mind believe that there IS and MUST be another way, what makes you think your subconscious mind can? If your subconscious mind can’t believe it (where the majority of creativity takes place), you won’t get very far in coming up with alternative approaches to try. The conscious mind is the gatekeeper to the subconscious and only when you can convince the gatekeeper that there is another way, will the subconscious think the same and get to work on finding exactly what that approach is.
When you start getting ideas on how to change your approach and start executing them, this course of action will usually result in absorption of specialized knowledge accrued via material such as books, tapes, videos along with valuable experience. When you start executing different approaches, learning as you go along from the books you read and the results that ensue, everything starts meshing together and working synergistically behind the scenes even if you don’t see it as first, and what happens is that all that begins to translates into momentum, which is what you ultimately want when it comes to persistence. Along the way, doors will open, contacts will be made, ideas shared, and the fruits of your efforts will start to manifest.
The best part is when you begin to accrue all that knowledge and experience, because then you have a big enough “data set” to analyze in order to see what works and what doesn’t. Then you can start to “hone in” on the “sweet spots” and begin to build off of what works. You’ve already “been around the block” so you know where the best place is to build.
You use your creativity to think of new approaches and you execute them, knowing they will lead you down different paths and then you begin to accrue a “ball” of knowledge and experience picked up along the way and you dissect that “ball” of knowledge and experience to find the essence of the matter and then you start to build off of that. Your new ball will be dense and no longer filled with air because you know what works and you continue to go in that direction to dictate your future course of action. It has weight to carry, but this never would’ve happened if you didn’t change your approach. Some approaches will fail. Some will succeed. Focus on what approaches made you succeed and build off of that.
Changing your approach is not a one time thing you do. It’s a continual process of refinement that results in many natural byproducts that all mesh together to help you pinpoint what the essence of the solution is that you’re trying to find.
Along the way, your beliefs will be strengthened, your creative muscles flexed, knowledge and experience deposited into your mind, knowledge of what works and what doesn’t gets discovered, and all that gets used to fuel the fire of momentum to ultimately get you to where you want to be.
Changing your approach is a necessary pre-requisite to gaining that all valuable intangible essence that everyone would like to have – experience. Experiences of failures. Experiences of success. Experiences of experimentation. There’s always another way to solve the problem and another and another and another. Soon enough, when you begin to try all of them, you will discover the common threads that make up the successful ones and that will point you in the direction you want to be and your future results will be exponentially greater than when you first started.
