On one of his recent Mindset Mentor podcasts, personal development coach Rob Dial repeated a show I've heard before, but have felt to be one of his more significant and applicable topics: what makes people quit their goals. I guess at this time a little more than a week after many people have started out with their New Year's resolutions, a large portion of them are having second thoughts about them...if not giving up altogether. Citing Don Kelly and Daryl Connor, who first presented their Emotional Cycle of Change in 1979, Dial lays out the five stages in goal development:
1 Uninformed Optimism-great enthusiasm and misplaced confidence
2 Informed Pessimism-dawning awareness of the goal's difficulties
3 The Valley of Despair-discouragement and a feeling of futility
(Connor and Kelly have the 3rd stage as "Hopeful Realism"-also a bottoming out but with more optimism)
4 Informed Optimism-understanding that the goal is attainable with the means to attain it
5 Completion-the lack of ability has been replaced by incorporation into habit, becoming part of identity
I can look back into my past and see how I encountered the above different stages for various projects I've pursued. And since I've set about to structure some of my retirement with new projects, I know I will have to meet each stage as it comes. Rob Dial suggests that, at that beginning stage, I spend some time and effort to ascertain exactly what it is that I want to achieve and why...this can be of supreme importance in not giving up when stages two and three come into play. Dial's "Valley of Despair" makes more sense to me than Kelly and Connor's "Hopeful Realism"... then again you could just add the latter to the former and make it six stages instead of five. For me, personal projects are like adventures leading to other adventures...a lot of fun but also a lot of hard work, with failures along the way to be seen as outcomes I can learn from...
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