Are you getting in the way of your own progress? Try this…

Success & growth in our lives require progress. Whether it’s the transition from student to professional, switching career, or turning raw ingredients into a meal, they all require that little bit of continuous change and improvement.

But why can making progress sometimes be so hard? And how can you get out of the way of sabotaging your own success?

In this article, we examine one of the main obstacles to progress and provide some thoughts on how with the right mindset, you can start to move stumbling blocks out of your way.

It all starts with ‘trying’ too fast

Picture this. Give a child a recorder for the first time and ask them to learn to play a tune on it. 

Assuming the child works out how to get a sound out of the instrument, the child needs to master several things to become a competent musician. Breath control, which fingers need to go over which holes to play different notes, rhythm and how to put all the notes together to form a coherent musical phrase. Unless you’re a day one natural genius, none of these things come without slow practice and dedication.

But a reason why children often quickly become exasperated with learning musical instruments is because their approach to learning the instrument is flawed from the outset. By wanting to play an instrument well instantly as though it was their favourite computer game, they miss the bigger picture that to become technically proficient in any walk of life requires a methodical approach to practising in order to build the self-awareness which senses and alerts you to when you’re going off course.

If you’re struggling, don’t try harder, do this instead

When you fail to make the progress you want, it can be easy to become discontented and give up. However when your lack of progress becomes painful or causes anguish, is exactly the time when stopping and asking yourself, ‘what exactly have I been trying here?’, can be incredibly useful.

Whilst stopping seems counter-intuitive to making actual continuous progress, it can be an incredibly useful tool to advancement, because it allows you to pause and ask the following questions:

• What am I trying here?
• Am I actually aware of what I’m trying, or am I working on auto-pilot?
• Is what I’m trying actually working?
• If it isn’t working, have I tried something different, or am I trying to get the thing that isn’t working to work?
• If I’m trying to get the thing that isn’t working to work, why am I doing that? 
• Am I afraid of letting go of the way of doing things that isn’t working?
• What am I actually fearing if I were to let go of the wrong thing?
• Am I worried about what others might say if I try something different and get it wrong?
• Is it rational to think about what people might say in the future, if my main focus is to make progress right now?
• Has humanity actually evolved without making mistakes?
• If not, will I give myself the chance to progress through learning from my mistakes?

If you answer each of these questions honestly, you may start to reveal why progress feels hard and develop the awareness and the confidence to try another way which opens the door to the progress you seek.

How the exam system can wreak havoc with your future progress

Much of the developed world relies on exam grades as a benchmark to where you get to study or where you get to work. However, having to pass exams inevitably means that to be seen to progress, your main focus at school is on ‘trying’ to pass exams.

One of the key downsides to some exam systems is that when final grades are published, you don’t actually get to see your marked papers or the areas where you got marked down. That makes it very difficult to fully appreciate your areas of misunderstanding or knowledge gaps and the focus on ‘trying to pass’ and ‘get the best mark’ can subtly encroach into your professional life at the expense of constructive and critical thinking.

Once in the world of work, the inability to think on your feet can also make progress difficult, particularly if you become reliant on others to do the thinking for you, but they are too busy to explain their thought processes in arriving at an answer or a solution. Relying solely on others when your progress stalls ultimately denies you of the opportunity to stop and analyse your thought processes. And without taking a step back to assess whether the problem is trying the same ‘wrong’ thing over and over again, often hides the fact that taking a slightly different approach could open the door to the progress that you’ve been desperately seeking.

Muscle memory vs. new muscle

When learning a musical instrument, a child will develop good or bad muscle memory. Good muscle memory allows the child to play freely and enjoy performing. Bad muscle memory inhibits the ability of a child to breathe efficiently and in turn, for the body to provide enough oxygen to fine tune the muscles that are required to play the instrument well. The secret to mastering an instrument is to develop the right kind of muscle and ingrain it in the memory so that it can be called upon to perform freely and effortlessly in front of an audience.

Similarly if you feel a lack of progress hit in another vocation, it can often be because either the thinking muscle being used for the job hasn’t been fully trained & developed, or because it is being used in a continuously and habitually faulty way (unbeknown to you).

However, in order to make progress again, you have to first stop the wrong type of thinking muscle from getting in the way. And that usually means having to end one way of thinking for good, to make make way for the learning of a new type of thinking which then becomes a more productive habit.

Simple but difficult but simple

Making good progress can feel really simple when everything is going well. But making no progress can feel really difficult, particularly if you think you are ‘trying hard’ to find a solution.

Ultimately, the real secret to making the progress you really want is making the difficult, simple. Things often become more difficult, because we are continuously trying the wrong thing without realising it. But unfortunately, if you try to make the same wrong thing better ten times by using exactly the same approach that made you go wrong in the first place, it’s unlikely that you’ll get very far!

However, what if each time you felt yourself struggling to make progress you were to stop and think, ‘how can I do or approach this differently?’ By pausing for thought, you might find that instead of focusing on and repeating the wrong approach, you create just enough space to give the right approach a chance. And in doing so, you will start to build the muscle of self-awareness that can turn despair into hope and get you back on the right track again.