Being More Willing

It’s easy to get excited about your self-growth when you think about how good things can be. Consistent habits, dialed in routines, and a perfect harmony of your personal and professional lives where you make a lot of money making a huge difference, while still sharing incredible experiences and a fun lifestyle with the people you love.

On the other side of all that ‘good’ is the potential that things aren’t so good. Where good habits are sporadic or painful. and it's hard trying to motivate yourself to get up and out of bed for an early morning workout. Your routines get interrupted or disrupted by other people’s plans. You fail to strike a good balance at all as the demands of your life exceed the capacity.

But as it turns out, these two realities are two sides of the same coin.

Darren Hardy talks about success like a pendulum. If you want to travel to great heights, you need to be willing to pull the pendulum back far enough so that the momentum carries it forward. It’s like the concept of big risk, big reward. The upside of one thing is closely dependent on the downside of it.

This is why I want to talk about willingness. Your capacity for success in anything is equal to your willingness to fail in it.

We need to be willing to get rejected for the sale if we want to close it. We need to be willing to get our heart broken if we want to deeply love. We need to be willing to face the consequences of missed deadlines if we want to push a fast pace in our work.

And unfortunately many people are unwilling to expose themselves to the chance of something bad, which limits their ability to achieve something good.

Willingness, taking risks, and being bold, is a skillset. And the way you improve a skill set is by training it. 

In my life, this was an area I wanted to grow in. I wanted to make bigger moves, push my boundaries further, and accelerate forward. So as part of my morning routine I started doing one bold thing. This held me accountable to making an ask of someone, or a commitment to something that made me nervous, every day before my day even started.

Over time, my tolerance to doing bold things grew stronger and I found myself stepping into more difficult tasks throughout the day with less hesitation. I built the skill, and the improvements I experienced in my life elevated as a result.

And all that changed was my willingness to do things that were hard, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar. And I systematically built a mindset that has pushed the overall ceiling for what I’m capable of!

If there’s a change you want to make in your behaviors or mindset, you can do it! I promise you that. But you just need to be willing to try.