Don’t Give Up! 4 Ways to Improve Perseverance
Why do we love an underdog? The odds are stacked against them. It’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel for them. When we see them struggle, we get behind them and help them rise up by offering support. When they start to build momentum, we get up on our feet and really start to cheer. When someone overcomes the odds, we celebrate their accomplishment. We see this take place every March in the college basketball tournaments and we see it happen all the time in our lives.
Why do we cheer on the underdog? We all know that it’s very easy to give up when things don’t go our way. We’ve all been in situations where a missed opportunity has discouraged us and made it difficult to persevere. Life is full of challenges and to see someone else rise up and overcome those challenges, makes us feel like we can do it too. It’s important that you keep trying. Every day you try is another chance for success.
Once you accept that you’re destined for success, giving up is no longer an option!
Instead of throwing in the towel, seize success by following these strategies to acquire the drive to persevere and achieve your goals:
- Analyze why you didn’t succeed. This is perhaps the most crucial step in ensuring you don’t give up easily. Sometimes it’s difficult to deal with failure, so much so that we just feel the urge to curl up and cry. However, by analyzing what actually prevented your victory, you might be surprised at how simple the fix can be.
- Did you forget a crucial step?
- Were external forces affecting your focus?
- Did you prepare yourself enough for the challenge?
- Is it something you truly wanted to pursue to begin with?
- Reward yourself. Even though you didn’t achieve the success you were expecting, that doesn’t mean you didn’t give your full effort to the task. And your efforts should never go unrewarded! Reward yourself for what did go right and treat yourself to a “pick-me-up” when you’ve fallen down:
- Treat yourself to your favorite dessert.
- Show yourself some love by getting a massage.
- Get your car detailed. A spotless car can look brand new and might actually help you to feel brand new!
- Carry out activities that you do well. Often, not succeeding may cause you to shy away from ever trying something again. You can build your inner strength and confidence by performing activities that you know you’re good at.
- Get out on the court and play some winning basketball.
- Challenge an opponent to a game of chess.
- Work at balancing those income and expenditure reports.
- Do anything you know you’re good at to help build (or rebuild) your confidence.
- Set smaller, attainable goals. Just because you didn’t score the last time doesn’t mean you can’t score at all. Why not break up that big goal into smaller, more attainable ones? Perhaps you were overwhelmed by the task and somehow lost focus. By breaking it up into smaller goals, you’ll be more likely to achieve the big goal.
We often just say, “That didn’t go as I expected it to,” throw our arms into the air, and walk away, defeated. Less often, we analyze why something went wrong and figure out what a better path could’ve been. Analyzing the outcomes helps us to build resilience because we have something new to try the next time and we can attack that project with the energy and anticipation we did the first time.
This also retrains our brain to focus on the positive aspects of the task or project. We often have a negative attentional bias where once something goes wrong, we start noticing things that are going wrong more often. This sends us down a slippery slope that doesn’t have a good ending and usually results in giving up on one or several different things.
If I struggled with a project, I might temporarily move to a different project that I’m more comfortable with to allow myself to build my confidence back a little before jumping back into the project, or something similar, that didn’t go well.
I talked about this in my three-part series on goal-setting. There are three types of goals to set – outcome, performance, and process. Each is important and it’s important to break your bigger outcome goal into something more manageable which is where performance and process goals are helpful. It’s also good to reward yourself along the way to achieving your outcome goal. As in the example from the mini-series, if I reach my process goal of lifting weights three times this week, perhaps I reward myself with an ice cream snack on Saturday night. This will help keep you engaged in your goals.
No one ever said that perseverance was easy; in fact, it can be extremely difficult to look past the mistakes, failures, and under-achievements and try again. However, being able to persevere and push through until you win shows true strength and resolve. It’s how the underdogs ultimately win!
So don’t give up too easily. You can’t win them all, but you know that you definitely have what it takes to succeed.
Once you build your confidence, drive, and will power, you’ll see how easily you can develop the ability to persevere until you achieve what you set out to achieve. Nothing is impossible once you believe in yourself and allow that belief to drive you forward!