It’s often easy to see other peoples’ internal strategies but it’s not nearly as simple to see your own. We all have failure strategies, by the way. You need to figure out what your own is. Maybe this will help give you insight.

My Own Failure Strategy

I’ve figured out my personal “failure strategy”. It runs often.  As I said, you might learn something if I share it with you; it goes something like this:

1. I think what I want, decide I am going to get it and tell myself that I am.
2. I immediately think of all the problems that stand in the way of getting what I want, knowing that if I cannot solve them, I will fail.
3. As I start to feel unsure about overcoming all obstacles in a timely manner, I start to feel unsure of myself. I begin to question my own judgment.
4. The uncertainty and complexity of solutions and the probability of failure starts to grow.
5. I make fitful efforts at thinking about the goal, pretending I’m still striving for it, talking to others as if I am, and I carry out desultory actions to achieve it.
6. I soon start to modify the goal either changing it into something more “realistic”, or start adding time modifiers that would soon kick it out of the game.
7. I know in my heart of hearts that I’m not hitting the bar for the effort required to succeed. Instead I get “tired”, disinterested, de-motivated and drink to forget the issues.
8. I remember my spectacular successes of the past and use that to congratulate myself for being brilliant.
9. I do not associate (NLP term) with the effort, integrity, focus, pleasure, ingenuity and continuous activity required that was the real reason for my successes, not my “brilliance”.
10. I constantly allow myself to get distracted with off-target diversions, all seeming necessary.
11. I sooner or later find a new goal that is exciting and inspiring and get involved with that.
12. I allow this to displace the original goal, which I discard or re-classify as “sometime-maybe”.
13. Eventually I lose sight of the goal and am not acting on it, without even admitting that I have quit! Continue reading →