500 Words a Week - Helplessness
This blog comes from the back of some insightful comments from Chris Williamson on his podcast.
“There’s a price you need to pay in order to be ready to take advantage of whatever platform comes down the line.”
“All the work you put in to develop the skills that you need, means that when the opportunity finally comes, you can take advantage of it.”
“All of the time that you’re sat spinning your wheels, wishing that you had better opportunities in front of you, you can take that as I’m going to be more ready when that opportunity rears its head.”
We spend so much of our time thinking about where we’d like to get too. What we would like to achieve over the next 3-5 years, or more. We begin to feel at times we may never get there. That the opportunity isn’t going to come. The above quotes from Chris provide us with a wonderful way of viewing where we are at. We can be conscious of the fact we haven’t achieved what we want, but by viewing where we are now as a wonderful way of developing our skills and abilities so that when the opportunity does come along that we’ve envisioned, we can seize it with both hands and put our best foot forward.
I recently finished reading “Grit” by Angela Duckworth. Much of what Angela says links to the above from Chris.
“To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times and rise eight.”
What all the above centres around is that if you’re not at the level you want to be, you thought you might be somewhere else, you thought you’d be higher, you don’t quit and change paths. You don’t become resentful of those passing you by. You become conscious of what you’re developing. Every day, every week, you’re furthering your skills and abilities. You’re readying yourself for a time when that opportunity you’ve always wanted comes up.
This drastically changes our mindset and how we view our situation. From what I’ve gathered, a major cause of unhappiness/ stagnation, is when we feel helpless. No matter what we do, nothing will change for us. It’s a cycle, we feel we can’t help ourselves, so we do nothing, which makes our feeling of helplessness further cement.
Whereas, thinking about what Chris and Angela discuss. A slight change in our outlook, can help us feel like we are putting a foot forward in the right direction, and each day we just need to take another step forward.
