How Flexible Are You?

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People who want to achieve success in their lives and are committed to self improvement know the value of setting goals and making workable plans for their realisation. These are essential steps to success and we've previously talked about many things that we can do to help us determine our goals and to set about achieving them.

Perseverance and determination are essentials for success. You need to have a burning desire to reach your goals and a total resolve that you will not be denied. You must be committed to achieving your goals, constantly hold a clear picture in your mind of you goals as already achieved, and be determined that you will succeed. And of course, you must take consistant action towards you goals.

But an equally important success skill is the ability to make adjustments, to change your plans and goals, or even abandon them completely if necessary. We need to be flexible and prepared to adapt to changing circumstances.

One thing we can be sure of is that things rarely go according to plan. Even with the best planning, the unexpected can and probably will happen. Things beyond our control can make our plans unworkable. Or our plans may not be working because they are flawed.

It's easy to become so involved and attached to our goals and plans that we may not even be aware this is happening. Sometimes, if we are, even in the back of our mind, aware, we may not be prepared to accept that we aren't getting the expected results. Sometimes pride can override rationality and common sense.

It's important to be able to step back and take an impartial view of our progress. We need to be able to take a reality check to see how we are doing and, as much as possible, to gauge our results. Achieving results can take a long time, often much longer than expected and it's rarely realistic to expect overnight results.

It's also important to take as balanced and realistic a view as possible. It often won't help to just keep trying different things or to be constantly changing direction.

Try to objectively decide if you've given a course of action a fair try before jumping to the conclusions that things aren't working out. It may just be that you underestimated the time things would take, or perhaps some adjustments are required.

You may have to try a different route or plan to get the results you're looking for, or maybe you need to alter your expectations.

Perhaps your plans need to be delayed to allow you to learn new skills that you hadn't anticipated, and should be put on hold rather than abandoned. Maybe you had left out some important steps from your plans.

It's been said that actually achieving a major goal is nowhere near as important as becoming the person that you become on the way to reaching the goal. Learning the necessary skills and becoming the person you need to be to reach any important goal will inevitably take some people more time than others. Patience is required. Some people's plans and actions will be more effective than others and this is another reason why flexibility is important.

Sometimes goals that we thought were important to us aren't achieved for good reasons. Perhaps they weren't congruent with our values and achieving them would have caused unforeseen personal conflict, or perhaps we had underestimated the impact on our family and friends. In this case we need to think again about our values and goals and what is most important to us.

Inevitably, we will all make mistakes along the way and not everything will work out. But this is not failure or defeat. The only time we can fail or be defeated is if we decide that we are defeated or have failed - and give up.

We definitely must never give up - many people have missed out on reaching their goals because they gave up too soon. But we can't afford to be dogmatic either. We must be prepared to be flexible and adapt our plans and goals to changing circumstances if necessary. As the old saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat!

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