The Payoff of Persistence
When You Want to Give Up, You Need To Focus.
Achieving any personal or professional goal involves a point where the option to give up is irresistible. During these moments of feeling defeated, we can resign ourselves to the belief that all that remains in our power is to accept defeat.
Alternatively, we can allow our true power of persistence to rise to the challenge and focus on finding new ways to progress--especially since a shift in perspective can be all it takes to transform how we experience our reality and our ability to achieve our goals.
The invaluable payoff of persistence arises once we've pushed past that feeling of having nothing more to give to discover that we do.
By perceiving the same circumstances differently, our state can change from exhausted to excited from one minute to the next. Yes, our minds are that powerful.
What we choose to focus on and how we think about things can transform how we experience our current and future reality. We are limited primarily by our beliefs and perceptions of what is available to us and what is possible.
What motivates us sustains us.
It's easy to underestimate the power of persistence and overestimate how much effort it requires. It can be relieving to open ourselves to thinking about, approaching, and perceiving our situation from an alternative perspective. Stepping back and taking some time out rather than quitting can be equally alleviating.
A different point of view, new environment, and time away from what's in our way allows us the necessary time to recharge and recognise other available directions and ideas for solutions.
Strangely enough, everything we need is often right before us the entire time. Still, when we are overwhelmed by hopelessness and the barriers hijack our attention, we fail to recognise that slightly to the left is the bridge illuminated before us.
Remembering our "Why".
In the face of frustration, loss of heart and fatigue, we benefit from taking the time to recall and review our driving motivation. If our why is enough, no challenges, setbacks, or hard work will deter us for long.
Achieving goals involves overcoming obstacles—there's no way around the hard work intentional change takes. The passion driving our why is vital to energising each step forward. The effort to overcome resistance and turn deadends into portals becomes inspired action rather than more work.
Our Why is Our Anchoring Reason to Continue.
The obstacles become an adventure embraced once we decide to be unstoppable in our mission. A why genuinely aligned to our values is critical to endurance, unlocking the perpetual openness to the question, "Well, what if I try it this..." until what we try results in sufficient progress.
Why we start something matters. So we need to know it. By clarifying our purpose and reminding ourselves of the benefits at the end of the road, we can maintain focus and direction through any storm. With focus and persistence, working towards a goal is a transformative process.
Choose to Stay Focused
Keeping our why at the forefront of our minds is necessary, which can reignite our determination--It can help us find the strength to get up and put one foot in front of the other as many times as necessary to arrive.
A Personal Experience with Persistence and Payoff
That's how I taught my body to keep down and digest food again. I had to reprogram my autonomic system. The effects of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder meant I was in fight or flight mode. Meaning my body was stuck in the sympathetic mode, survival mode, which shuts off the digestive system.
To teach my body to get into the parasympathetic mode of rest and digest, I eventually discovered that spending time in the sauna daily and taking hot baths before eating helped. So did any kind of exercise to release excess nervous energy.
I was desperate to learn to eat in ways people seem to effortlessly. It was mortifying to have a PhD and be incapable of eating like a five-year-old can. Shame is why it took me so long to get professional help.
Initially, I thought I was trying to overcome eating disorders, but I eventually understood that eating disorders were a maladaptive behaviour to manage the underlying problem. The goal was to be able to eat. However, I simply couldn't calm myself down to digest food because of the impact of trauma on my mind and body. The way I'd automatically dealt with it was disordered eating, which has had horrible consequences. But the disordered eating helped me survive at various periods in my younger years.
My life transformed once I started working with a dietician to determine better strategies, what foods caused the most minor discomfort to digest, and how to get all my calories in one meal. I learnt the hard way why it's so important to seek help rather than try to reach our goals alone and in secret. We need to focus on the outcome, not trying to do it invisibly. If it requires help, we need to get help.
For example, I didn't have anorexia to be a specific size. I simply couldn't eat because it made it impossible to manage anxiety with too much energy which even a mouthful of food could result in. Alternatively, when I was too depressed to move and had chronic fatigue, I couldn't keep down food because the effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder paralysed my digestive system.
How I eat now is medicinal. It's what the psychiatrist I'm seeing at Alfred Hospital through the Functional Seizure Clinic has further confirmed is optimal for a mind and body significantly impacted by trauma. Functional Seizures are a consequence for some who have experienced significant trauma during their formative years.
Since 2020, I found a way to make it possible for me to eat healthily and be alive today. In 2020, I was 38; I'd been trying to find a way to eat in a way that wasn't disordered since I was 14. For me, the payoff of persistence is life. My why was because I wanted to experience how everyone else seemed to be able to eat without it being such a big deal, causing exhausting daily obstacles and massive stress.