If you want to succeed in life, one of the critical success factors is perseverance. You might wonder what exactly perseverance is. Perseverance is the attitude of not giving up. It is about determination and tenacity. Successful people are mostly possessed with perseverance through displaying tremendous effort in doing something and the determination in keep doing it till the end, even if it’s hard. It is about the ability to stay focus to continue pursuing the goals you set despite failures and setbacks.
Perseverance originally comes from the Latin word perseverantia, which means to abide by something strictly. Nevertheless, we do need to differentiate determination from stubbornness. It is important to recognise when to be determined to continue and when to quit. Not everything we try is right for us and we should not be too concern about being seen by others as quitter or a person that is lack of determination. Underlying rule is, always listen to our heart as it will let us know if something is or isn’t right for us because we know ourselves well enough. Let me share with you the SPAR technique to master the power of perseverance:
- Set passionate and stretchy goals
- Make sure your goals are worthy. It is all about you. The goals must be passionate enough because you only live once (YOLO). Make your trip here worthwhile and achieve all the dreams that you want.
- Get out of your comfort zone. Be bold, be daring enough to pursue the dreams of your life, and do not settle for mediocrity or second best for yourself.
- Follow SMART rules and make sure goals are specific and precise enough, measureable for tracking, achievable within you capability, relevant to yourself and most importantly it must have a timeline for completion to create the urgency.
- Plan according to the leading activities
- Do not get overwhelmed by the audacious goals you set. Break your goals into bite-size target and according to milestone basis so that it builds your confidence and momentum up along the process.
- Remember that success is not the destination, it is a journey. It is important to understand the processes involved in achieving your goals and layout the leading activities or steps you need to accomplish that will lead you to achieve the goals.
- Set your pace accordingly. Many occasions, you might need to repeatedly perform certain leading activities but with a faster pace. Therefore, it is important to first go according to your current strengths and build up your capability along the journey.
- Action and reflection
- Make the goals visible. It is easy to be drifted away in life from what we really wanted. Worst still it is easier for us to back down from the goals we wanted when the journey get toughen. One of the ways is to make your goals visible. Make a dream board and display it at the places you will see very frequently every day or every time, and not forgetting the places you will go first and last of the day.
- Use Visualisation technique to support your success. Many successful people practice visualisation every day where they see in their mind’s eyes the vision of success. Through this they are able to utilise the power of subconscious mind by creating the vivid experience, the confidence as well as the energy required.
- Have proper tracking on your action & record your progress. What gets tracked gets done. Along with the dream board, we need to create a dashboard to record our action and monitor our progressive results. It will help us to stay on course to our destination and to provide analysis on areas for improvement.
- Enhance you SKAs (skills, knowledge and attitude) after identifying areas for improvement. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Everyone has shortcoming that needs to be handled before moving forward. These shortcomings could be the hindrances that drag us from succeeding and overcoming them by acquiring new skills, knowledge or attitude will be the crucial resolution.
- Redemption and Re-energize
- Understand that failure is part of the process. All people have failed at one point or another; but successful people are the one that preserve to get back on their feet, brush off the failures and find a new way to accomplish the wanted goals despite the unintended failure.
- Establish a support system and invite people important to you to walk down the path together. Having them to praise you on efforts done and celebrate with you on every small wins accomplished. The encouragements received from people important to you will definitely be a strong booster to motivate you to continue fighting to achieve your wanted goals.
- Keep going even if you are on a bad day, stay focus on the tasks set for you. The whole idea is to break the goals down to bite-size actionable targets or activities. Your job is to complete the tasks according to the schedule.
