THERE'S
ALWAYS TOMORROW
Remember
the times you set out to improve in some way. Perhaps you wanted to be
more patient with your staff; or to become better organised; or to make
those follow
up calls to your existing customers? Perhaps you wanted to be a more
understanding partner or loving parent. When you decided to change, you
were full of resolve.
You had such good intentions. And for a while it seemed to work.
Then one day you didn’t get it right. You lost your temper; you slipped back
into the old ways of filing everything in the bottom drawer or you didn’t get
around to phoning those valuable customers like you’d planned. You went home
feeling bad. Perhaps you even felt a little bit like a failure. All night you
kept thinking of what you had done wrong. The next day you went to work discouraged.
You told yourself you would get it right today but in your heart you knew you
wouldn’t. You were still kicking yourself for what you had failed to do the
day before. Predictably, you didn’t do any better that day either. Again you
went home feeling down with low self-esteem.
Eventually the whole idea of trying to change your ways became stressful.
It triggered feelings of failure and inadequacy. It was better not to think
about it. Then you started thinking that maybe there was nothing wrong with
the way you had always done things anyway. The next thing you knew, you were
well and truly back in your old habits. The resolve to change had gone.
All that was left was the nagging thought, deep in the recesses of your mind,
that you had failed.
It is hard to change your behaviour and develop new habits. We should recognise
this. We should also accept that since giving up old habits is difficult, we
are not likely to succeed in changing the first time we try. We should even
tell ourselves that it is okay to fail, providing we pick ourselves up and
try again. Henry Ford used to say “Failure is just another chance to begin
again more intelligently.”
I went to see the movie “A Beautiful Mind” recently. You probably know the
story. A brilliant professor suffers from schizophrenia and has paranoid delusions
that make it impossible for him to function in society. He tries to beat the
disease without the help of drugs, which in those days caused more problems
than they solved. In one moving scene he is describing to his wife how he had
disgraced himself that day by letting the delusions get the upper hand. He
is explaining to her how he had behaved in a bizarre way in public and had
been the laughing stock of those present. Needless to say, he was feeling depressed
and without hope.
His wife listened patiently to the day’s events. When her husband had finished
telling his story, without passing judgement on what he had done and in a calm,
matter of fact way she said, “Never mind. You can try again tomorrow.”
What a wonderful piece of wisdom. We don’t have to get it right the first
time since there is always a tomorrow. To try and fail is not the end of the
world. There is no need to feel depressed and despondent. You do not have to
beat yourself up for not having succeeded the way you would have liked. You
can try again tomorrow. And if you do, you are likely to succeed eventually,
just as the professor did in his struggle (it is a true story by the way).
In fact, everything we know about practice tells us that the more we practice,
the better we get and therefore the more likely we will be to succeed in the
end.
So now you don’t need to fear trying to change. You can confidently set yourself
some challenging goals, knowing that if you fail, you can try again tomorrow.
To try and fail is not a weakness.
|
