The most popular New Year’s Resolutions are the following:
- Improving Our Diets (45%)
- Losing Weight (44%)
- Saving More Money (41%)
However, 92% of Americans fail to achieve their New Year’s Resolutions each year – myself included.
So what can we do to be apart of the 8%, achieve our goals, and improve our lives?
We need to trust the process.
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What Does It Mean To Trust The Process?
To trust the process means to remain committed.
It means showing up everyday, despite the challenges and not always seeing progress.
This is not easy to do – we are naturally wired to expect results right away.
So when we don’t immediately lose weight, improve our diets or save more money – a sense of failure creeps into our minds, our motivation tanks, and we become apart of the 92%.
That is why when it comes to our life goals, we need to learn to trust the process.
How To Trust The Process in Your Life
Trusting the process requires a shift in how we think about and achieve our goals.
Therefore, the remainder of this post will focus on 3 strategies on how we can foster this change in mentality in order to increase our trust in the process.
1. Focus On What You Can Control
The truth is that there are very few things that we can control.
We have the ability to influence outcomes for our goals, but never fully control them. This is a key piece of mindfulness.
As a result, it’s important to understand what we should be focusing our energy on.
This is because staking our energy on things that we can’t control will result in not actively making progress.
Broadly speaking, the most important thing that we can control is showing up. That is half the battle.
As an example, if we wish to lose weight, we shouldn’t constantly focus on how much weight we want to lose. This does nothing. Instead, our focus should be consistently making it to the gym or putting the time into improving our diet.
2. Embrace Failure + Apply What You Learn
From an early age, we are taught that failure is something to be avoided at all costs.
Furthermore, this fear of failure can paralyze us in our pursuit of perfectionism.
This can often be very debilitating. Nobody likes admitting they failed.
However, no matter how hard we try, failure is something that can not be avoided.
In fact, we should openly embrace failure because we often can learn our best lessons from it.
If we never experience failure, are we really challenging ourselves? Are we not taking on the necessary risk to get to that next level?
Embracing failure enables us to learn from our mistakes and make the necessary course corrections in order to achieve our goals. It is a critical piece in trusting the process.
3. Enjoy The Process
When we trust the process, we are committing to a long-term approach to our goals.
That’s because it can take time to see meaningful progress. As a result, we should not only trust the process but also learn to enjoy the process.
The easiest way to enjoy the process is through the concept of Flow.
Flow is defined as:
The positive mental state of being completely absorbed, focused, and involved in your activities at a certain point in time, as well as deriving enjoyment from being engaged in that activity.
PositivePsychology.com
What’s interesting about Flow is the implication that we feel greater satisfaction when we are deeply engaged working on our goals vs actually accomplishing our goals.
This suggests that a “Once I achieve this goal, then I’ll be happy” mentality can be a misguided approach to how we should think about our goals.
If you are interested in learning more about Flow, I recommend checking out Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Final Thoughts
I initially thought up the idea for this website back in 2017.
However, I did not trust the process at the time.
I was worried about things beyond my control, everything needed to be perfect, and I wasn’t focused on enjoying the process of writing.
That all changed in 2020 when I made the decision to finally commit to and trust the process. I finally hit ‘Go Live’.
One year of blogging later and I couldn’t have been happier with the progress I’ve made.
Letting go and trusting the process is nerve-wracking, however it ends up being a liberating experience.
Have you had a similar experience? Let me know!
Thank you for reading 🙂
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