Preventing Drift

If you’ve ever experienced success in your life maybe you’ve noticed something. The world opens up to you as you’re flooded with new ideas, new possibilities, and new opportunities. This is very exciting and validating in the short-term, but it’s also the shadow of failure.

Ben Newman, peak performance coach says that your response to success is actually your indicator for greatness. He talks about this at length in his book, “The Standard: Winning Everyday At Your Highest Level” and says that when most people taste success they become less accountable to the actions that produced it, and start to drift off. 

That’s why it’s so hard for teams to repeat championships. The natural response is to let off.

To put it another way, Greg McKeown in Essentialism talks about the success paradox where:

1) When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.

2) When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.

3) When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.

4) Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

What this does is it causes drift. Drift is when your trajectory slowly starts to change and leads you to getting further away from your goals. Whether it's success or life transitions or new chapters or whatever it might be that's causing drift, it all means that you’re slowly losing sight of what’s most important to you.

The best way to prevent drift is to have an extremely clear vision on where you’re headed. So that no matter the success or failures, blessings and curses, wins and losses - You don’t lose sight of what it’s all about. As deviations present themselves on your path, having a clear picture of what you want helps you to make more aligned decisions and ultimately, accelerate you toward your goals.

Think of it like Bumper Bowling. When you start to get off path, your vision acts like bumpers helping you make forward progress. But if you don’t have those bumpers in place, you’re likely to end up somewhere else and only realize it well after it’s already happened.

This is what a vision will do for you: It’ll help you define the life-balance you want to have. It gives you a decision making framework that you can run everything through before making a commitment. It helps you enforce the healthy and social lifestyle you want to live even when there’s a lot of money or status on the table. It holds you accountable to living within your core values so that you have a life that makes you feel deeply proud and filled with joy.

If you don’t have a clear life vision, or you haven’t revisited it in a while, tomorrow I’m hosting a workshop where we’ll create your 10 year vision that will serve as your guiding star, and makes it infinitely more likely that you’ll end up where you want to be in life. It won’t happen on its own, it’s up to you to take action, and showing up to this workshop is your way of getting on the path to making it happen!

That’s really it isn’t it? Either you can put your energy into building your dream life, or you can see what happens. The choice is yours!

Click here to register for tomorrow's live workshop: Visioneering Dreams To Reality