This is why you have low level of Perseverance and here is what you can do!
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up”.-Thomas Edison (1874-1931), inventor of the light bulb.
Do you sometimes feel like you cannot continue trying even though you know you can get your heart desires if you keep trying? Let me explain why and what to do.
We were all born perseverant! How?
Have you ever thought of the birth process or watched a video of a woman during delivery? If you have, then you should know that a pregnant woman goes through a very high level of stress during childbirth. What a lot of us do not know or sometimes forget is that the baby also does much work and goes through a whole lot of stress. While the mother must push, the baby also must put work into swimming out of the womb. From this analogy, we would see that a baby must keep trying and persevering until it comes out of the womb.
Let’s take another incident in the life of a young child. Have you ever seen a child trying to walk?
Initially, the child uses a support to stand, after which he/she tries to stand without support, and then takes his/her first step after which he’ll probably fall. Well, it happens that even after falling, he doesn’t stop trying but rather takes another try until he can finally walk.
What we learn subconsciously as children from the journey to walking is, first, that life is a gradual process and second, that we are going to have to keep trying (perseverance and persistence).
What we see from these two scenarios is that we were born perseverant. ‘How come everyone isn’t perseverant?’ you may think.
Right from birth, we pick everything we hear and see around us. We learn passively from the behaviors of people around us; and for this reason, we gain a lot of negative energy from our environment.
For children who, for example, weren’t allowed by their parents to learn to walk alone and were told to stop while trying their first step, they turn out generally less perseverant – expecting things to come to them on a platter of gold or they get fearful. That becomes the beginning of the end of their perseverance if not controlled well.
For other children who learn to walk, their perseverance is suppressed (it can be totally killed) when they start being surrounded by negatives; when they start being told to stop trying; when they are called ‘failures’; when they are told to shut up when speaking or told to stop playing; when they are told their plans will never work or when they are given things on a platter of gold.
Perseverance is killed when we start seeing people give up all around us and when we are not allowed to get back up independently when we fall. One of these many things is what killed our perseverance!
By being surrounded by negative people, our level of perseverance keeps reducing. By watching negative people, by listening to depressing news or taking heed to the naysayers, our level of perseverance keeps being suppressed.
Let’s stop doing these negatives, let’s hang around positive persevering people and substitute all negatives with positives and then our perseverance level just might increase.
The next thing is to have the mindset that you may not get things right the first time you make attempt and that’s okay, but you will try again and again till you get it right. This mindset preparedness makes it easy for you to cope if you don’t get it right.
Now, you know what has been killing your perseverance. Make sure to do the needful. Until next time, keep staying safe!
