Friday, May 10, 2013

Demands of Time and Task III

How do I believe in the tasks that I set for myself, that such are as important and achievable as anything that is set before me in the professional environment?  This is the problem I must confront and address if I am to be able to make a commitment that is as firm to doing my own items as it is to dedicating extra time to the demands of others.

Ultimately it comes from a core - a core that at it center states "I can do this".  "This" can be defined as any number of things - including things which I have never attempted or accomplished before.  But even not having attempted them before, the core maintains the assertion that if I try something, I can do it.

Do I have a history of this?  I do, if I sit and think about it for a minute.  There are many things that I have tried and done - perhaps with varying levels of success, but in every case with some level of success.  In fact if I sit and think about it, the times that I have completely failed at something are very few.

But they are always in my mind.  Here is a second issue.  The failures always seem to rise to the top far quicker than the successes do as if rushing to make themselves seen and heard.  And it they do not immediately make themselves there, the partial successes come to take their place - those things that I tried and perhaps did not completely fail at but did not completely succeed in the way that I had thought.

How to combat it?  The only thing I can think of is to begin to build a mental binder of successes.

The Woodsman in Build A Bridge  says the same thing:

"But remember what I just told you - you need to ensure that you take a moment to recognize the fact that you have completed what you started out to do.  This is the true reward, not just the destination that you are reaching.  You will build many bridges and go to many destinations; every completed bridge will become a picture in your mind until you have a gallery of bridges which will mark you progress through life."

When those thoughts of failure leap up I need to combat them with pictures of successes.  When thoughts of driving myself away from those tasks I want to accomplish to I need to go back to those pictures of the times I have accomplished and dwell not just on the accomplishment but how I felt when I achieved it, because the feeling of achieving an accomplishment is inevitably much greater than the degraded sense of relief I feel checking another thing off my work "to do" list.

I cannot control the demands made on me by the outside.  What I can control is what I see and adhere to as a vision on the inside.  The choice to dwell and believe on that which I can do rather than that which I cannot is not something that anyone can make me do even as it is not something anyone can do for me.  In the end, demands of time and task are deterimined not so much by those making the demands as they are by what I am willing to believe in - and in believing, to accomplish.

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