Recently a friend of mine said to me, “When you review your progress, there are two ways to look at your results: glass is getting fuller, or glass is getting less empty.”
For example, if you are trying to lose weight, you can see things as “I’ve lost seven pounds,” or you can see them as “I still need to lose eighteen pounds to reach my goal weight.”
I think this is a great distinction. The first way of looking at things, where you celebrate your progress, is the much healthier and productive attitude.
When you focus on how far you have to go, things can become overwhelming. It’s tempting to say, “What’s the point?” What you do today can seem like a drop in the bucket. The entire time you spend working toward your goal is time you spend feeling inferior, because you haven’t reached your definition of success yet.
But when you focus on the progress you have made, then you can feel good about yourself. You’ve made improvements. Little successes are still successes. This will give you more motivation, and create a success spiral where each small victory pushes you on to greater victories.
This isn’t just to feel good about yourself. There’s all sorts of research showing that positive feedback and rewards work better to motivate people than negative feedback and punishments. This includes the feedback and consequences we give to ourselves, even if they’re just the feelings in our own heads.
I’ve seen the advice that instead of (or in addition to) keeping a “To Do,” list, you should keep a “Done” list. I haven’t tried this myself, but the idea intrigues me, and I certainly agree with the sentiment behind it.
I was given an excellent reminder of why this is the better perspective just last night. In the morning, as part of my ten-minute regime, I had written down seven things I could do to move me closer to my goals. Then before bed I reviewed the list, and realized I hadn’t done any of them.
At first I found this disheartening. But then I remembered that it was a list of things I *could* do, not a list of things I was *required* to do. It’s aspirational, not mandatory. I should feel good about accomplishments, but not feel bad about items left undone. Before I started this regime, failing to do anything to move toward my goals was my base state. And now, after keeping the regime up without fail for forty straight days (which itself is quite an accomplishment), I’ve done things to move toward my goals on 39 out of 40 of those days. I should be happy about that.
Nobody is ever perfect. As you improve, you’ll always find new things to improve upon. So if you have a glass-empty approach, and view yourself in terms of distance from achieving your goals, you’ll be faced with perpetually moving goalposts. You’ll never reach that magical point where you’ve solved everything.
If your mindset is “Be dissatisfied with your flaws, and then work on fixing those flaws,” you will always be unhappy, because you will never run out of flaws. Whereas if your mindset is “Be happy with who you are, and then find ways to improve on that so you can be even happier,” you’ll generally feel pretty good about life.
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