Lower The Bar

Oftentimes, we'll get overly excited and raise the bar too high. We'll tell ourselves that we're going to build all these new habits and do all these great things starting tomorrow. And we all know how THAT tends to plays out.

I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to jump to “TOO BIG” goals too soon, many times, and struggled to achieve any of them. And then, not to mention, the things that none of us wants start to take place in the picture.

Yes, you guessed it- stress and procrastination.

I believe it's a better strategy to lower the bar – where you're basically just aiming to show up to start your work. And the reason why this is a good idea is that you'll have an easier time fighting procrastination when the task seems easy.

You see, procrastination is majorly an emotional thing - when our work seems too big and scary, we tend to turn to something more pleasant - like playing on our phone or just sitting without doing anything. You can avoid all of this by setting the bar so low that barely any negative emotions can even occur.

Just take a second and think about opening up your laptop and writing just one sentence. Now compare that to the idea of writing an entire 3-page paper. There's a huge difference, right?

When you lower the bar – and stick to it – you will also experience a boost in confidence as you'll start to believe that you are someone who can get things done. What you have to do is just show up and start taking action. And this will make it easier for you to overcome stress for tasks that seem too big and scary.

The point – if you're just starting - don't go so hard on yourself, lower the bar and just focus on start taking action so that there is barely any room for negative emotion.

Let's take it from Jeff Bezos, he said,

"I think one of the things that's very important to note about stress is that stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So, if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that's a warning flag for me. What it means is, there's something that I haven't completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find, as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first email message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation, even if it's not solved, the mere fact that we're addressing it, dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think in large part. So stress doesn't come. People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You can be working incredibly hard, and loving it. Likewise, you can be out of work, and incredibly stressed, over that. And likewise, if you kind of use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work, but you're going through a disciplined approach of a series of job interviews and so on and are working to remedy that situation, you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing."

This whole "LOWER THE BAR" thing is one of the ideas that have had an impact on my life - and I hope that this leaves an impact on yours as well.