How to Stay on Course
One of the problems with fulfilment or success being a place you get to or a goal you hit is that once you get there, you can stop. When you hit that financial target or book that client, all the good practices start to slide and you can end up spiralling back down the Inward Attainment Map without really noticing. If we want true fulfilment and enjoyment in our work, it’s something we need to get used to working on little and often, rather than something we do one big push towards. We need to learn how to stay on course.
This is the biggest struggle in the Ascend stage of the Map: staying the course, maintaining what you’ve built whilst continuing the momentum towards new things. It’s easy to drift, to become complacent and realise that you’re not actually where you want to be at all – even if on paper everything looks like it’s going great. You might be being offered opportunities that you’re grateful for and say yes to, even if they take you away from what you really want to do. You might ease off on important habits or routines, or get into a comfort zone that stops you from innovating (raising my own hand for that one).
With Ascend, it’s less about having strict action steps to do, and more about maintaining a mindset. It’s about being intentional with every action and decision, keeping a bird’s eye view of your business and where it’s going and making sure everything has room to breathe. If you feel like everything is going fine but you’re a little disconnected, then these three mindset changes will help you to stay close to your goals and keep focused.
Keep checking in and course-correcting
We tend to do check-ins with ourselves and our business either with the calendar, or when something is going wrong. Make no mistake, these are great – but can sometimes be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. If they’re the only way you’re keeping track of the direction of your business, they limit your ability to be proactive. If you’re only checking the coordinates on a boat every three months, the potential to drift drastically off course by your next check-in is huge.
This is not to say that you need to allocate lots of time to journaling and delving into the depths of your soul, but to create a habit of checking your course little and often. This might be a minute at the beginning and end of your day to set an intention, or ten minutes when you’re planning your week to go back over your plans and goals and make sure your to do’s are focused on them.
Conscious choosing
We go about our days making all sorts of decisions: what to have for breakfast, which email to tackle first, whether to go for this colour or that colour. Some of these we have to make almost on autopilot in order to stave off decision fatigue and stay somewhat sane. However, the autopilot decision-making can start to creep into more affecting areas. You can start saying yes to requests on autopilot without really thinking about it, you can autopilot through a launch calendar or autopilot your way into over-committing your schedule.
Conscious choosing is a habit in which, when you are about to make a decision or commit to something, you take a beat to make sure you are really choosing to do that thing rather than going with the flow. This means that when you’re about to reply “yes” to speaking at an event, you check whether it feels aligned with your core values, you think about whether the logistics feel worth it, you feel for whether it is something you truly want to choose to do or you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. And you make the final decision empowered that it was your conscious choice, rather than autopilot taking you off course.
Towards and within
The final shift is to adopt a Towards and Within mindset. We live in a world that pushes us to always be striving towards something – financial milestones, SMART goals, dreams. But only working towards these goals leaves our everyday existence as a purgatory of waiting until we can actually enjoy what we’ve built. If we’re not having a good time while we’re working towards our big vision, it is incredibly difficult to stay motivated and stay the course.
Towards and Within means that while you are still working towards your idea of fulfilment and your goals, you are also working within that vision too. So, for example, whilst you are working towards a place where you can outsource your admin to make more room for creativity, you also prioritise an hour a week to have that creative time rather than waiting for when you’re “allowed” to have it – and makes it all feel more worth it.
If you’re intrigued explore more about the Inward Attainment Map and dive into ways to create lasting mindset changes in your work, The Trail could be a great fit for you. Find out more here.
