When you fall, you don’t always have to start from the beginning. What do I mean by that? Well, I commonly see a lot of people who set goals for themselves, and consistently under perform on what they set out to do. After about the first failure, discouragement creeps in and finally the goals are discarded. Now to decipher what’s wrong with this scenario, let’s consider a real life example.
Bob is addicted to smoking crack
Bob stops smoking crack
Bob joins AAA
Bob gets to a week in sober
Bob smokes again
Bob get’s his one week sobriety chip revoked
Bob starts from Day 1
Bob is angry that all his hard work meant nothing in the end, decides he can’t stay sober and starts smoking again
Bob tries heroin
Bob never goes to AAA again
END
The thing with Bob is…well I guess it’s that he’s addicted to crack. The example may be extreme, but the point is that he didn’t see his progress as a goal in itself. Instead of taking heed of the strides he made during his journey, he treated his fall as an utter defeat. That’s akin to playing a video game, beating half the bosses, losing, resetting the game to level 1, and claiming you might as well not play anymore.
No! That’s not a good way to treat things! In our lives, we as humans tend to see our incomplete goals as lost causes. The thing is, giving in to this sick game of human psychology, we’re all unconsciously making the conscience decision to restart the game. To never backtrack on good progress seems logical, yet most of us see a fall where a stumble should be. Smokers who relapse after 5 years get punished by a removal of their blue chip, students will usually falter in their study habits with the outcome of one bad test, and an offender of petty theft may think of themselves as a full fledged criminal mastermind with no hope of redemption!
Anyway, all I ask of you the reader is to treat the stumble accordingly and be proud you even got so far as to even have the opportunity of stumbling because that my friend, is an accomplishment in itself.