What happens when you do your best and it’s still not enough?
What happens when you try but still come out a loser?
What happens when you care and love and give but get hurt?
What’s your plan then?
(You might be asking yourself that question right now.)
It’s a swift kick to the gut to believe that you delivered at the top of your game and still came up short.
But what do you do? Do you give up?
Do you accept mediocrity? What’s the plan?
Here are six steps to guarantee you do better next time:
- Be brutally honest about your performance. – Be candid about where you dropped the ball. You can’t get better if you allow yourself the caveat of making excuses. Analyze each part that you don’t like and be brutal with all the details.
- Force yourself to list ways you can do it better next time. — Write down what you plan on doing better. Once you know what you don’t like, take the time time to create a list of things that you can work on later. And write down more than you might think you need to.
- Explain to someone else your strategy for next time. — Talk up your analysis and action items to those around you. There is something deeply inspirational about communicating your vision of a better you to those around you.
- Get a coach (or special training) in the areas you need more help. — There are experts out there who can help you get to “bad-ass status”. Hire them. Read their books. Take their classes. Save yourself the frustration of learning the hard way.
- Make weekly/daily practice of your new skills a priority. — Put improvement on your schedule. It may not seem urgent, but steady forward progress is the single biggest secret to driving outrageous future improvement.
- Do a better “best” next time. — Plan on putting everything you’ve learned on the line next time. Take the new training, the new skills, the new ideas, the new “you” and make the next time a better time.
The only thing that separates you from doing your best and losing and doing your best and winning is having a better best.
That’s just about you being better.
You don’t want to be the best anyway.
If you can’t get any better, then you aren’t really the best. You’re just mediocre — a “has been”.
It’s hard to get back up and start working after losing.
Most of us will chose to work hard enough to just be better than the few people around us.
But imagine how amazing you could be without any limits.
That’s you being better than you are right now.
But it takes honesty and effort and getting hurt to make that happen. And that’s “over the line” for most of us.
We want better without the work.
And that’s why we stay mediocre.
