Posted by Tony Wilson. Tony is a workplace performance expert and creator of the Focus Planner on 30th Mar 2023
VIDEO: Don't Just Chase Achievement. Start Where Your Are.
Being a high achiever is great. But sometimes it backfires. When you're starting something completely new, or you find it hard to get traction with a new behaviour or goal, sometimes the answer is to Start Where You Are. This might be just the self-love you need to progress your goals.
Start Where You Are
If you are listening to this, I’m guessing that you’re an achievement-oriented person. And that’s great – until it’s not.
You see everyone has things they are not good at. Now, when we are driven by achievement and outcomes, it means that we are constantly focused on where we want to be – and when we apply this to things that are difficult, it can make us frustrated and demotivated. The alternative, is a concept called ‘start where you are.’ For things that you know you are not good at, forget where you want to be and instead, just focus on getting to the next step – just being a little better than today, and let yourself feel a sense of accomplishment for those incremental improvements. ‘Start where you are’ is such a useful concept for both managing ourselves when we are struggling, or managing others who are not as achievement focussed.