We are our enemy

When we are trying to make a significant change in our lives or when we have an ambitious goal we want to achieve, our biggest struggle isn't necessarily with the work itself or even the effort needed to complete it.

Our biggest obstacle is our own attitude, our own intimidation and insecurity. We measure the scale of our desires against our estimation of our abilities and find ourselves wanting, regardless of the actual reality.

This is not a new problem and most suggested solutions involve breaking the overall goal down into smaller, supposedly more manageable steps.

However, that just replaces the intimidation of the sheer magnitude of the overall goal with the intimidation of the sheer number of smaller tasks. It does nothing to address our perceived disparity between the needs of the goal and our own abilities.

If we felt inadequate before, it is unlikely that this approach will fix that.

Fear is our personal reality

Another way we could possibly get through this impasse is to lower the bar, to reduce the level of our ambition to the level of our insecurity.

But that doesn't feel right. It feels like giving up because it is giving up. We shouldn't lower our expectations before we engage just because we are intimidated.

Intellectually we know this. But the thing about something intimidating is that it's intimidating. The actual reality of the goal may be that is achievable but our reality is our intimidation.

Feelings are motivational and none more so than fear so this intimidation is not something that we can easily talk ourselves out of no matter how much we intellectually know we can handle things.

So how do we decrease our perceived gap between our ability and the need of the moment while at the same time still preserving our ambition?

Practice vs Failure

The answer is to build in failure from the start.

We plan from the beginning to make more than one try. If we execute our plan knowing that we will be making subsequent tries then the results of the first try become less individually important. We can afford to screw up because we know we're going to try again.

That is to say we plan on iteration.

Iteration is not repetition

Iteration is very different than merely doing something over and over again.

It's not that you started off intending to do it perfectly, failed, and are now trying again. There is a conscious decision to do things more than once and as a result it's easier for your ego to accept that the first try doesn't have to be perfect.

We are lowering the bar, but temporarily. And that makes all the difference.

In addition, by breaking that seal and allowing yourself to be less than perfect you set a precedent for yourself so that you don't hold as tightly to this need for perfection in general. As a result even your subsequent tries don't feel so fraught with meaning.

But iteration still means holding yourself accountable, in two specific ways.