WHY PUSHING HARDER doesn’t work

When you feel stuck around your calling, the first move is usually to push. You set a new goal, make a better plan, get up earlier, or look for a new strategy. That makes sense. It’s what worked at school and early in work life.

But if you’ve been pushing for a while and things still don’t move, the problem may not be effort.

What your heart wants

Deep down, you know what you want to experience, contribute, and grow into. When you can feel that and follow it, you move toward your calling more easily.

Goals that aren’t yours

Early on, most of us pick up habits that make that hard to hear. So you may end up chasing goals that aren’t really yours, or going after them in ways that don’t fit who you are. Over time, that shows up as results that don’t match your effort, rough feelings, or both.

Three loops

What gets you stuck is pushing against your own nature. It usually looks like one of these:

• You set a goal, miss it, drop it, pick another, and repeat.
• You analyze, plan, act, and analyze again, until you burn out or quit.
• You don’t hear your own direction, so you take on someone else’s goal. Then hitting it feels empty, or missing it leaves you stuck.

Pushing harder only makes these loops run faster.

Where the cause sits

Think of it in layers. On top is what you live day to day. Under that are your thoughts and actions, and under those, your deeper feelings. Deeper still is the way you go about things, and what drives it.

When you ease the push against yourself, you see more clearly what’s going on, inside and out. Then you can change things closer to the root, or sometimes choose a goal that’s truly yours.