The Solution to FEAR: Choose Your Effort

Mirriam-Webster defines effort as, “a conscious exertion of power.”   As President Calvin Coolidge once stated, “All growth depends upon activity.  There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.”  

In life, good intentions mean nothing.  Without effortful activity, transformation can never occur.  

Think of your mind as a system.  According to author Dan Heath, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. ”  If our “system” is designed to respond to the distractions and wisdom of the world around us, it will result in an effort level indicative of that system.  

The self-help market is flooded with literature on goal setting and productivity.  However, there is no “hack” when it comes to bypassing a lack of effort.  In life, we fall to the level of where our “systems” take us.  

What systems exist in your life right now that focus on the input rather than the output?  

How are those inputs impacting the choices you are making regarding both your effort and your attitude?  

As author James Clear says in Atomic Habits, “Outcomes are about what you get.  Processes are about what you do.  Identity is about what you believe.”   System change takes work.  Simply “wanting” to change can never overcome a bad one.  We have to make the effort to alter the processes and systems we have in our lives. That begins with our habits of thought.  And if we want to get out of the fog, we have to take action to gain clarity.  

We all have a choice to make.   There is an old Chinese proverb that reads “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second-best time is now.”  It takes courage to stand up to the lion of fear we face at times as leaders.   The transformation of our minds to seeing challenges as opportunities instead of threats to our safety is more a matter of input rather than output.  

In life, we only truly have control over two things: our ATTITUDE and our EFFORT.  Both require choices we must make.  Having the courage to choose wisely amid challenging circumstances requires us to develop habits that, over time, allow us to begin to alter the perspective of our roles as leaders.  Finding our way through the fog of fear starts with building solid systems of input that allow us to begin changing the ways we think through the problems we face.  

See you next week, friends!