'Never settle'
When I was about twelve years old, I used to mow the little lawn we had at our house.
I’d push the mower along this hill, and weave it around the trees.
When I was finished, my dad would come out to inspect it.
He’d look around each little tree, and then say:
“You missed a bit here”
I’d look down at the little blades of grass.
Then go get the mower back out, start it up, and go around again.
Then he’d come back out.
“Hold on… You missed some over here” and point to a few more bits of grass.
This infuriated me. In my mind, he was doing this to trigger me. So to counter, I would go get a pair of scissors to chop each bit of grass that he pointed to, to try and make a statement. He didn’t care. He would just shrug and say the job was still not done.
At the time I thought this was some kind of vendetta against me.
But later I learned that he was focusing on the follow through.
He wouldn’t ‘settle’ for the result that wasn’t what he wanted to see.
And he was teaching me this lesson.
When we try to make a change in our reality, when it gets hard, it’s really easy to ‘settle’ for how things currently are.
The default, or the status quo that we’ve created in our life is comfortable.
But when we settle, we accept ‘less than’ what we want.
Let’s look at business marketing
Say you’re a trainer, or a yoga teacher.
Like most service providers, you’ve probably got some pretty deep experience in one area, which is why you are building a business around it.
And now you want to write or create content for some marketing.
So you focus on articles, and email marketing, plus some social media.
But this new area is totally foreign. You haven’t done it for long, and it’s awkward, and takes time. You had a goal of writing an email weekly. But now it’s been a few weeks, and it hasn’t gone out.
The next step, is to ‘settle’.
Shrug your shoulders, and relax back into what it was like before, and just put up with it.
The old reality continues.
The thing is, this happens everywhere, not just business. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this a lot more in my personal relationships than anything else. In particular, my marriage with Ruby. It’s really easy to settle into an ‘average’, boring marriage as you go along. It’s habit. But I was reading the other day about marriages. Over 50% of them end up in divorce. And 75% of those divorces are instigated by women. So that ‘average’ is no good. So to me, if you want an exceptional marriage, then you can never settle. You can never really relax. You’re always on duty, because otherwise you slip, and the relationship slips.
If you decide to not settle, you’ll find another gear.
You might piss some people off as you raise your own standards. People might not be used to that…
But they’ll learn.
Don’t settle for less that the outcome that you want to see. If you’re looking for a new relationship, don’t settle. If you want a result in a running race, don’t settle. Keep extending yourself, staying curious, and growing.
When you do this, you’ll find a new level of motivation and energy to create the change that you want to see.