Selfalot

Daily Quote: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” Jimmy Dean

When you have committed yourself to a huge task and you cannot get out of it you often use a method to help yourself through this ordeal. And that is breaking your progress down into tiny achievable steps and small victories .

An example of this is Terry Fox. Terry was a Canadian humanitarian, athlete, and cancer treatment activist. He became famous for the Marathon of Hope, a cross-Canada run to raise money for cancer research, which Fox ran with one prosthetic leg.

When he was once asked how he managed to run so far he said that he told himself ‘just one more telephone pole’. His courageous run has inspired running clubs all over the world to hold Terry Fox fundraising runs to raise funds for the fight against cancer.

When you have set yourself a goal of whatever magnitude, keep your eye on the main prize but at the same time make sure that you have many small victories that you can celebrate. Small steps that you can take regularly, even daily, towards your goal.

There are many stories about J K Rowling and how she wrote every day and sent out her books to publishers endlessly before a publishing house had the courage to take her on as a client.

In the 2009 Worlds Athletics Championship a Great Britain runner achieved a bronze medal. In a quick interview on BBC after winning the bronze medal, Jenny Meadows commented “It proves you should never say never, you should always believe in yourself. If you work hard and keep the faith, good things will happen’.

Have you set yourself a major goal and found you could not continue with it? Was it too much to ask of yourself? Did you give up?

What would have happened if you had focused on small steps towards this huge goal? Every day a step towards it. You set aside an hour a day or maybe even two hours per day to work towards your huge dream.

This could be training to your first ever marathon. It could be a dream of playing the organ in your church and you practice an hour per day. What about becoming a writer? Spend one hour per day writing a few pages of that best seller novel.

Or you might want to become a famous photographer, designer, public speaker or whatever you have secretly dreamt of wanting to do. What would one hour’s effort every day do to those dreams?

One thing is certain, that kind of relentless effort would bring you closer to your dreams. And if you did this over several years, you will be able to play the organ, take magic photographs, design those cute children’s clothes or write your first novel.

Take those small steps, run to the next telephone pole and take just one more step towards your goal. As the old saying goes ‘Rome was not built in a day’. Take this saying to heart, it still applies today.