Today I wanted to talk to you about keeping moving forwards, maintaining that momentum, maintaining your positivity and perseverance and eventually that perseverance becomes a habit.
What is the most dependable fuel for change?
Persistence!
Where do you find inspiration for your own persistence?
I hope you enjoy the video.
I love talking about inspiration and trying to find inspiration for myself and I find inspiration in many different areas from books, movies, quotes and from people around me. Sometimes I can find inspiration from the most innocuous looking people.
That is how we are inspired as people, we can look at other people, see how they are inspired and see how their lives and minds have grown – because of other people.
One of the best places where you can find inspiration is within yourself, with your own personal victories and your own personal things that you’ve done in your life, that you are proud of and it’s in these achievements – no matter how big or how small – you can find a level of overcoming your fear and perseverance and persistence that you never thought was possible.
It’s good to look at other people, but when you look at other people there is a certain distance not only between you and them, but between the fact that you can’t get into their brains. You can only dig so far into their history and what makes them tick, what made them do what they did, but with yourself it’s a very easy process to dig down and to find ways of patting yourself on the back, of moving yourself forwards.
Our achievements are only gained through out own persistence and it’s the same thing for everybody else. No matter what achievement or success, personal achievement or wider achievement that people have made in their lives it’s always been through persistence.
It’s been through that one thing of dogged persistence, I’m never going to give up, I’m going to carry on doing this no matter how many times I fall, as long as I fall forwards I am going to be able to get back up again and carry one, even if I fall backwards, I am going to get up again and carry on my forward momentum.
Every success that has happened down through history has happened because of that one thing, because of persistence. Persistence is getting off the starting line and moving forwards and making that forward movement, getting momentum and then persisting and persisting and persisting and eventually persistence will because a habit.
The habit of persistence is a much more valuable tool in your life than will power will ever be, you’ve only got a certain amount of will power that you can call upon. I suppose will power to a certain extent is persistence made real in your own body.
Persistence is that thing that is not effected by anything, regardless of how tired you are or what’s happening in your life, you are going to carry on, you are following a path and you will will stay true to that path, until you get there.
The path may diverge when you get there, but if it does it is a positive diversion and one that you’ve chosen to make. You’ve discovered that following the set path isn’t working and so you change that direction a little bit. That’s still part of persistence and the onward journey, the forward progress.
Think about it, every habit that you’ve got in your life is a product of persistence, any habit is built through repetition, it’s built through repeating something, over and over and over again. If you don’t persist at a behaviour it can not become a habit as simple as that. Your alcohol drinking habit has been built through persistence.
I know it is a different type of persistence than the persistence of heading in the opposite direction and quitting drinking alcohol but it’s persistence none the less, look at how much persistence you had to have in the beginning of your drinking habit, to overcome the taste, to overcome all the tendencies that your body and mind threw at you to try and get this chemical out of your body, to not do what you were doing, but you persisted doggedly until you got used to it.
It’s the same thing for anyone who has ever smoked, the first time you inhale a cigarette you nearly cough up a lung, it’s a horrible feeling, why would you ever do something that made you feel that way? Why would you repeat that process? It is because of persistence and the reason why we do it persistently is because we have motivation to do it outside of the feelings that we’ve got.
For me and for most young people when they start smoking or drinking it’s because of the persistence and motivation of other people. We are motivated to appear more grown up, we don’t want to appear childish or weak in front our peers and that’s the thing that gives us that drive and that motivation and that’s something that you need to find in your adult life and the beauty of it is, in your adult life you have the brain to do it, you’ve got the mind to think things through and to find the motivation which is going to ideally work for you.
You won’t do many things in life unless you have the motivation to do them and the tougher something is for you to do the more motivated you have to be to do it, so you have to find that initial motivation.
It may be difficult to find in the first place and in order to find it, you must do it! You can go so long in this journey with just your initial thoughts of working on something. Something bad has happened to you, you’ve had a really bad hangover, you’ve had a shitty time with alcohol and something bad has gone wrong and you can work only so long on that, on that motivation, but you’ve got to find something in the future which will really and truly pull you forwards.
If you don’t find the motivation for the bad thing that has happened to you, it is going to win because those kind of things are short lived in your memory. The hurt diminishes over the time as do the feelings – if somebody threatens to leave you and they don’t – than the motivation it initially gave you, is going to disappear.
If you are getting pains in your stomach and you give up drinking for a little while and the pain disappears, it is easy to go back on the booze again, so there are many of these short-term consequences that disappear after you’ve stopped drinking alcohol and once the pain has disappeared it’s very easy for the gremlin in your head to start work on convincing you to go back on the booze – for you to basically convince yourself to go back on the booze.
There was a great book that I read a few years ago called ‘Think and Grow Rich’ and it was by a guy called Napoleon Hill’. One of the things that he said was “He’s never seen anything as persistent as a postage stamp, it sticks to its job like nothing else” and that’s what you want to be. That’s the type of persistence you want to have.
It’s just that persistence of a postage stamp which is stuck to your personal postcard, from your desired destination, from that place that you want to be. Be that postage stamp and stick to your job until you get there. So where is that perfect destination that your postcard is going to come from? Where is that going to be? What does it look like to you? What are you going to feel when you get there? Who is that person going to be?
Once you get that perfect destination in your mind, focus your mind on that, all it takes is five or ten minutes just sitting down and thinking about that perfect destination, about that place and person you want to be, about who you want to be physically and mentally. Who you want to be in your relationship, who you want to be financially, all those kind of things.
Spend five or ten minutes every day just bolstering up that thinking, planning how you are going to get there, thinking about your plans and I’m telling you once you do this, once you forget about the alcohol, which is the thing that is stopping you from getting were you want to be and once you can lock your horn, lock your sights onto that perfect destination and like Neopoleon Hill said, stick to it like a stamp to a postcard, you will get to where you want to be so don’t give up until you get there.
Take care of yourself, keep the alcohol out of your mouth, stay persistent, stay strong, keep focused on that onward journey, focus on that desired destination and like Napoleon Hill said be like a postage stamp and just stick to that task like glue!
“A river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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