45: Journey Over Destination: Why the Process Matters

The person that experiences the most success is the one that’s able to be flexible and adjust their perspective. This means being open to doing things differently, but it also means being open to seeing things differently. And seeing your journey and your goals in a positive way, removing the fear of failure, can be a really powerful tool to create resilience within yourself. 

Fear of failure is a very real, paralyzing emotion. But what if I told you it doesn't have to be? Failure is perceived, and changing your perspective can completely reframe your journey. If you understand that every new situation is a chance for growth, you can stop seeing things as failures and realize that learning something new is a success in itself. And when you believe that you didn’t succeed, you take an incredible opportunity away from yourself to examine what you learned and what targets you did hit, even if those things weren’t your original goals.

So my three tips for you to create resilience in your journey are:

Stop defining things as failures and learn to pick out the wins in every situation - practice removing that failure mentality from your life. By forcing yourself to remove the word, you’re actively changing your perspective. Something good comes from every situation, no matter how small.

Accept the journey you’re on, however easy or hard, and appreciate it for what it is - No one said it would be easy, and no one said it would be hard. So whether your journey is a breeze or really difficult right now, accept it as it is and learn to adjust. If it’s easy, maybe that’s an opportunity for you to create new disciplines and try new things. And if it’s hard, maybe you need to give yourself some grace, or lighten up in other areas. I’ve had patients come and talk to me about not being able to lose weight and their journey being really difficult, only to find out that they were dealing with really stressful situations that made it particularly hard to lose weight. So if you can, try to gain some perspective, maybe talk to your physician, but overall learn to appreciate your journey for what it is, adapt for challenges, and grow in moments of peace.

You don’t need to have it all figured out - This may feel like an obvious one, but this is not going to be a breeze where everything is rainbows and unicorns, and nothing ever happens. Things are going to come up, changes are going to need to be made. The problem arises when you’re not easily adaptable to those situations, which can slow you down. Consistently is more easily reached when you can be adaptable and adjust to changes. 

I think one of the biggest ways to create resilience for yourself and avoid getting bogged down in things is becoming married to the journey instead of the results. When your journey is your destination, there is no losing. You can’t fail at something when the goal is to try. So try, find new angles, learn to adapt, and you’ve already won.