The Plan
You’ve just heard an inspirational speaker and you walk away saying to yourself: “From now on, I will always be true to myself. I will take time to enjoy life. I will express my feelings. I will be a happy person, 24/7.”
Alternatively, after an experience that inspires you to believe you can change you may walk away saying, “I will never make a mistake again. I will this perspective and this confidence with me always. From now on, I will be perfect.”
You can’t expect yourself to be perfect; you can only expect yourself to learn and to grow from your mistakes. The contingency plan of what to do when things go wrong is not the undesirable option; it’s the only real-life option. It’s also not pessimistic to expect that things will go wrong. It’s optimistic to expect that when things go wrong you will be able to overcome them.
The inspiration provides the motivation; on its own it doesn’t get you unstuck. Inspiration points to a goal; it doesn’t get you there. For inspiration to bring results, you have to walk away from inspiration with a plan. This has to be a working plan, in other words a plan that will work for you.
So bask in the sunshine of a beautiful ideal. Imagine being there.
And then, figure out the steps you need to take to get there, and make a working plan for what to do when something in the process gets jammed.
You weren’t true to yourself. You’re not taking time to enjoy life. You didn’t express your feelings honestly. You weren’t happy. You weren’t perfect. What will you do then…?
The Anchor
In the link to yesterday’s post, the speaker talked about four kinds of resilience:
1) Physical resilience. Don’t sit in one place for more than an hour at a time. Get your body moving.
2) Mental resilience: Tackling a tiny challenge gives you strength to tackle bigger challenges
3) Emotional resilience: Discover your ability to provoke positive emotions in yourself. Maintaining a ratio of three to one positive to negative emotions adds years to your life.
4) Social resilience: Reach out to others in caring ways.
After hearing this talk, or any inspirational talk, you can turn the inspiration.into an anchor. For example, in this talk the speaker challenges the audience to complete a small task. Completing the task and not stopping in the middle requires mental resilience. The more you exercise your mental resilience in tackling a tiny challenges, the more you will be able to tackle future challenges.
You can then turn the inspiration into an anchor that you can use in real time, when you’re struggling to tackle a challenge that you don’t feel like finishing. The best anchor is your own past successes. Go back to the memory of when you tackled a challenge. Put yourself into that frame of mind again. In this way you recall your strength and infuse the task with positive energy.