imPossible Goals

Common reasons for failure

Many of us very often lack the necessary frustration tolerance to achieve their goals. Frustration tolerance is the ability to do something now only to receive a reward later. The more vague and indefinite the reward might be, the greater this tolerance needs to be. We also need frustration tolerance to be able to better deal with defeats and our own shortcomings.

With young children, it is easy to test frustration tolerance. This test only makes sense without prior practice! Give your child something sweet to eat and tell him, "I'm going out now and if I come back in 2 minutes and you haven't eaten it, you'll get a second sweet with it." If you come back and your little child has already been able to resist the urge to try it, then the chance for your child to master difficult tasks in life is very high.

It's about reward procrastination, we might go to a party today or we might sit down in the evening to finish our project extra well. It's about being able to wait calmly for the moment and being ready to practice something often enough!

If we want to achieve goals, we should like the associated tasks and hardships or deal with the frustration. For example, many self-employed people fail not because of their core work, but because they don't like the bureaucracy (accounting). They find this area too annoying, which is another description for: "it frustrates me too much".

Frustration tolerance is extremely important and plays into many subsequent points again and again. It is a basic competence for success!

Are you now of the opinion that if I improve my frustration tolerance, then I will definitely achieve my goals? Then this IF-THEN relationship is unfortunately wrong.

From an early age we are taught IF-THEN relationships. So parents are very fond of using this relationship to make something happen with us children. "If you sit quietly now, I will take you to the playground later."

Just as our parents often failed to fulfil their IF-THEN links because it suddenly rained and yet there was no time to go to the playground, we now also use these links carelessly and even negligently by not doing something we have set out to do.

In doing so, the link suggests an important connection to our brain that can limit our volition (implementation of motivation). At some point, our brain no longer believes that we are really rewarding ourselves after an action.

More and more our mind automatically deletes our reward after most THENs and replaces it with: "Blah blah blah" or even worse: "It doesn't matter what you do, nothing good will ever happen for you!" Accordingly, we don't need to wonder why we don't feel like taking action despite being highly motivated.

Even if our personal IF-THEN link is well established, we can fall into a dangerous logical trap.

Does my IF-THEN logic really fit? Does B really follow automatically IF I do A or is it different?

Many people come to my gym and say: "When I'm fitter again, then I can do more sport!" Isn't it rather the other order that fits more often: "If I do more sport, then I'll get fitter and fitter and then I can do even more sport."

Many of us only want to change when they have achieved something. Only the sequence works exactly the other way round! Or have you ever heard of a world swimming champion who only started to take swimming lessons after winning the world championship?

So first we have to change the behavior in order to then be able to achieve (swim) the result.

What kind of lifestyle do world champions in swimming lead? They do commercials and are mega-famous, afford exclusive holidays and drive luxurious cars, don't have to work, can go swimming from time to time. They simply enjoy a very relaxed life.

Bullshit!

Swimming is YOUR job, and usually no trade union pays attention to the respect of working hours or the right to a minimum holiday. Their working day starts right after they get up, often as early as 5am, and ends only when they go to sleep. Their job includes a good diet and conscious periods of rest, only it is not done according to their own wishes, but is firmly planned. If they want to remain world champions, they have to train for many hours and, above all, work on themselves to be able to push themselves harder and harder. It's about constantly pushing the limits and paying attention to a lot of things besides swimming. Swimming is then only one part of the job: there is also optimal nutrition, getting up early even at weekends, competing at weekends in ever new places and completely gearing one's life to the sport. It's about giving all this and coming to terms with the fact that success may not come for weeks, months or even years! It's about getting back up after every defeat and saying to yourself, now more than ever!

This logical trap is even meaner when we have established our IF-THEN relationship and implement it in that order and still do not get our result.

In cycling, we liked to joke with the coaches after a training camp about its quality. Since it was often common to finish a training camp with a cycling race there was only a chance to get a good result in this race if the other riders also came exhausted from a training camp or if only bad racers were at the start. In these races, I was mostly busy being on the back wheel of the second to last rider. After this race came 2 or 3 rest days with very little cycling. After that we finished a lot of races on the podium or even as winners. Then we went to the coach and said: "If we train less, we will win more bike races!"

But this last IF-THEN relationship would have been correct only if you did something else before it. Often, IF-THEN relationships are rather IF-THEN-IF-THEN-IF-THEN logic chains, where all IF-THEN relationships have to be completed in order to reach one's goal with the last IF-THEN link.

a. This mistake arises because we have not dealt with the situation thoroughly enough!

b. Or because we do not fulfil the prerequisites for one of the preceding and important IF-THEN relationships.

Maybe you meet many very important requirements to become a high jumper: high mental strength, strong jumping power, like to train jumping and have a good jumping feeling and timing for the complex movement. Only, like me, you are a broad stocky 5.75 ft. dwarf. Of course, as dwarves we can jump well by our standards, but we lose out to anyone who has half our diligence and similar jumping power, while being slimly built and perhaps even taller.

You have all the prerequisites for a successful high jumper: you are slim, 6.25 ft. tall and, apart from your age, you meet all the requirements to become successful in professional sport. If you want to start in this sport at the age of 30, you can become world champion in an age category, but it is too late for the 'normal' professional career. If success is also linked to money for you, then it is the wrong sport anyway.

Many also fail because they want to pursue a goal too late or too early, although good frustration tolerance learned early on can get you out of trouble.

Use of skills

Almost all of them fail not because of their intelligence or their abilities, but because of their use of them.

There are those who do not think twice and simply go into the forest with a blunt axe, without having a possibility to sharpen it on the spot.

And there are the others who make 101 plans about how and when they want to go into the forest. They also download the "When is the best time to cut the tree?" app on their cell phone! And when everything is prepared and the axe is sharpened twice, it's evening ... and unfortunately too late to go into the forest. So tomorrow it's all over again and maybe a little faster ...

The first manages to cut down a tree at some point and will have wood, albeit with ten times the effort. The second will prepare until the first has already cut down the whole forest.

Only when we test our skills in the right environment can we become better and also achieve satisfactory results for ourselves. So we should improve our swimming skills in the water and spend more time swimming than planning to swim.

It is frightening how often only action is talked about and implementation is almost completely forgotten. Some already know what could happen before they have tried it themselves. Especially in the area of approaching other people and explicitly dating, you can hear a lot of stories around it while observing NOT ACTING especially often.

Each of us can speak in their own way, so it's all about using the skill. Especially in contact with people, action counts because the "true reaction" will change depending on when we address a person.

Often we discuss something for hours, although it could be done in 5 minutes!

Favorite topic

Some topics of conversation we bring up again and again. We endlessly discuss the same "favorite topics" and thus cause them to continually dominate our thoughts. What do you talk about again and again? What thoughts occupy you again and again?

Do I make "losing weight",...