Section Four...Failure to Implement

The past week has been a hectic but exciting time for me. On Friday, the 7^th I traveled to Los Angeles to attend a seminar event called The Science of Getting Rich with the Proctor/Gallagher Institute. It was a very intense schedule and, between that and the traveling, pushed my body to its limits. I am slowly recovering from the effort but not the after-glow!

I will talk about the experience in the next blog but for now, I want to continue the discussion on Goals and the last section that Bob calls: Failure to Implement. 

Reason number eleven, in Bob’s opinion, is actually the number one reason why people most often fail at a goal and that is, simply, not moving into ACTION. Coincidentally, this is also MY biggest downfall. Bob says that writing down a goal and then not acting on it nullifies the goal and turns it into a mere WISH. He says to plot points for progress in the same way that you would plan a trip city by city.

The big question is WHY we so often fail to move into action on a goal. The most common answer is the fear of failure. But what we don’t realize is described perfectly by Mary Pickford in a quote where she says, “Failure is not the Falling Down but the Staying Down!” Everybody I have read in this industry says to get into action BEFORE you’re ready...get mobile...and as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do the thing and you will get the energy to do the thing.” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.”

Number twelve is that people QUIT too soon! The Law of Gender, one of the seven Natural Laws of the Universe, states that everything has a gestation period before it manifests just as any seed planted in the ground takes a certain amount of time to bear its fruit. An idea planted in our minds takes a certain amount of time to come to fruition as well, but we rarely know what that measurement is. There are certain things we can do to shorten the time-line, however, such as using our skills of focus, persistence and moving into ACTION. Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, was told several times by the successful people he interviewed over his twenty years of research, that success had come only one step beyond the point at which they wanted to quit! In a separate post I will publish the words of the famous poem by the anonymous author of Don’t You Quit.

Bob Proctor reminds us that trying to overcome old, long-embedded paradigms in our programming takes time and not something we can do in the space of a sit-com.

Finally, number thirteen in the list of reasons is that we don’t MEASURE our progress and make adjustments as we go forward. Emerson said, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” I love this quote because Emerson uses the word ENDEAVOR. He does not say we must be perfect on a daily basis but that we must only endeavor to make progress. Incremental steps in the right direction are certainly worth a lot more than no steps at all! Each little step forward adds to the momentum and as we make these steps, it is helpful for us to measure our progress as we go along.

With my goal commitment emails to the Proctor/Gallagher Team, I’ve been taking before and after pictures to send along with my statements of intent. It’s pretty cool to see the improvement on what a little bit of time and effort can do on a bookcase that is completely disheveled and overloaded to one that is clean, organized and somewhat relieved of its load.

To add to this example of measuring progress, imagine you are taking a trip by car across the country and driving about 2000 miles. It would seem to have no end in sight if you did not measure your progress along the way. Every time you pass a city on your travel map, you know you are making progress towards your ultimate destination. This way you can derive some hope in being able to eventually answer the perennial question...”Are we there yet?” J

In the next post I will put all thirteen reasons why we fail to keep our goals into the thirteen Rules to Follow for Successful Goal Achievement... according to Bob.

Until then...Happy Endeavors toward your success!

Cindy Hurd