This is episode 174, Creating Chances: The Power of Persistence. So this is a loving reminder/kick up the bum for all my clients in the membership, but you are all going to get to hear it as well. Are you ready? Let’s do it.

If you want to do things differently but need some help making it happen then tune in for your weekly dose of coaching from me, Maisie Hill, Master Life Coach and author of Period Power. Welcome to The Maisie Hill Experience.

Hello, gorgeous ones. At the time of recording, it is the end of April, so we’re around halfway through spring here in the UK. And if you’re a client of mine in my membership or if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ll know that at the start of every season I invite the members to set a goal of some kind. And sometimes I bring that onto the podcast as well and offer that to you. And the goal can be anything. It’s just something meaningful for my clients, something for them to get their teeth into over a 90-day period.

And it can be a standalone goal or part of a larger goal that they’re working towards. It can be something more internal like increasing confidence or the ability to make decisions. Or it can be something more external like competing in a weightlifting competition or creating a certain amount of money, going solo travelling. So also when I say internal and external, those things aren’t actually separate, they’re very much in relationship with each other, but you get the idea.

So the members are going through this 90-day period where they’re working with a specific goal, and I wanted to give them a little pep talk and something to reflect on at this stage. Because something that I see quite a lot is people coming up with a goal, an outcome that they want to create in their life. And when it’s all new and it’s fresh and exciting, they feel excited and motivated and positive about it all. I mean, that’s not always true. It really depends on the thoughts that you have about your goal.

And some of my clients knowingly and intentionally set goals that make them feel a bit nervous, a bit scared, a bit vomity, but they know that they need to do that thing. I had this conversation with one of my private clients recently. We were talking about the concept of a full body yes and what that actually means, or rather what we think it means, because I don’t think a full body yes necessarily feels delightful, I’m sure it can.

But to me a full body yes is an inner knowing that this is something I must do. It’s a quest that I must go on and inherent in that is the dread and the feeling scared and knowing that you must go on and that life is going to change. And all of that is also exciting. But a full body yes is more about being coherent and knowing that this is what I need to do rather than it feeling fun and joyful and pleasant.

So when you come up with a goal, you’re going to feel all sorts of things, depending on the thoughts that you have about that goal and what you think will be involved in order to get there. But it’s fairly common for there to be a sense of yes, this is what I’m doing. I am decided and determined and go get them, tiger vibes. Then one day goes by and another and then a week and another week and life just happens. It always does. The same thing happens to me too.

And your goal either remains the priority or it gets deprioritized for something else. It’s one or the other because there can only be one priority. And around here, we’re not in the business of judging ourselves for life happening. And you don’t need to judge yourself for maintaining focus on your goal, especially when society expects us to drop everything for our loved ones and for other tasks that benefit other people.

My son’s school always call me first when he’s ill and when he needs to come home and be picked up. And I don’t know anyone in a straight relationship with kids where the dad gets called first. I’ve never heard of it. And I have asked a lot of people if this happens. So there is for sure a societal expectation that the man gets to continue with whatever he’s doing with his work. And the woman will stop what she’s doing, and she won’t just stop what she’s doing, she’ll do it gladly with a smile on her face and with the patience of a saint.

She definitely won’t be frustrated or annoyed or any of those things. And this doesn’t just apply to those of us with kids it can happen in all sorts of personal and professional situations. Because even at work, if something comes up like planning a team get together or a client facing event, how often are those social tasks delegated to the men on the team? When are men expected to do them in addition to their regular work or for those tasks to take the priority over other projects that they’re working on?

So if you are focused on your goal and life happens and there’s an expectation from others and/or inside yourself that you should drop what you’re doing and tend to whatever, or more likely, whomever. Then you’re likely to come up against this tension, friction, that you’re going to have to navigate. And if you decide to remain focused on your goal, then learning not to judge yourself will be amazing because it’s an opportunity to overthrow those internalised societal beliefs that are very specific to gender. You get to overthrow those.

Likewise, if you decide to de-prioritise your goal and prioritise the other thing or other person or task, you also don’t have to judge yourself for that either. It makes no sense to judge yourself, but a lot of my clients do. And it’s as if they could or should have known that this would happen, and more than that, that you should be able to do it all. And really, I think the kindest thing we can do in those moments is just lower our expectations of ourselves.

Because when you’re already experiencing something challenging then you just want to be able to focus on sorting things out without additional pressures and without additional judgement or any judgement at all. So you start off prioritising your goal and you may or may not maintain that level of priority. And another thing that can happen is that the things you need to do in order to achieve your goal, they might be new things to you, things you’ve never done before. And you’re some version of excited but also nervous. Have you ever noticed how similar those feelings are on a sensory level?

This is how I deal with nerves, I just tell myself I’m excited, not in a gas lighty way, because the truth is I am excited. There’s also some nerves there, but with that physiological arousal that comes, that’s actually helpful, that boosts my performance. So I just go with that. But if your goal requires you to do things that you haven’t done before, and by the way, this is why I love working with goals because of what they require you to do and who you become as a result of that.

But if you’ve got these things that you haven’t done before and you’ve got a whole bunch of thoughts and feelings about doing those things, then again this is also why I love goals, because you have to be able to manage your mind and work with your emotions. But doing these things can mean you feel out in the open, visible and exposed. And I’m not saying that you are or you aren’t, but it can definitely feel like you are. So you are putting yourself out there and after you do something once, you might just want to retreat and take cover, literally or metaphorically.

If this is resonating with you, then I want you to answer the question, are you giving yourself enough opportunities to succeed? Or are you setting yourself up with the expectation that one attempt at doing something should be enough? This expectation can be conscious, it can be subconscious, so just check in with yourself and answer the question. Are you giving yourself enough opportunities to succeed?

Because whether it’s life happening or apprehension and nerves about doing things, we all need enough opportunities to succeed. And I’m not saying that you can’t achieve your goals on your first try, sometimes things do go as you wanted right from the start or even better than you hoped for. But more often than not, the tasks we set to achieve our goals require repetition and persistence. So if your goal is to write a book, you’re going to need to commit to multiple writing sessions, not just one burst of inspiration.

If you’re wanting to get a new job, it usually takes several applications and interviews to land the right position. You might even start a position and go, “Oh, no, this isn’t the one for me”, and going back to applying and interviewing. But it’s not just about doing the same thing over and over again. It’s also about flexibility and adaptability. So if your initial efforts don’t lead to the result you want, then something needs to change. And that can mean adjusting what you’re doing, your strategy on a practical level or it can mean altering your mindset, changing how you approach these tasks.

So are you equipped and prepared to adapt and evolve? But inherent in that is giving yourself enough chances, not just for achieving your goal, but for the learning process that comes with each attempt. So each effort that you make provides valuable insights, it might be a new way to frame your writing, a better strategy for your job interviews. This process is what leads to success. But if you’re judging yourself for not getting it ‘right’ straight out of the gate, then you’re not giving yourself enough opportunities. I can tell you that, you’re not.

Few achievements come without trial and error. And I know that that fear of failure or fear of success can be a significant barrier. But each failure really is a stepping stone that’s going to get you to where you want to be. There’s just opportunities to learn. They don’t mean anything about you, but you do get to refine your skills, to sharpen your focus, to figure out what actually works. And that might be completely different from what you imagined would be the thing that would lead to the desired result.

So to bring all of this home, I want to share the personal story from my own life that actually inspired this episode. So if you’re following along in my Mr Buttons journey, this is your latest instalment because I bought my first horse a couple of months ago now because I hired someone to help me with a few things. Specifically teaching Mr Buttons, or rather, teaching me how to lift his legs so that I can pick out his hooves. And that might sound very simple, especially if you’ve been around horses and you’re used to doing this. But I’ve only done it before with really experienced riding school horses.

And doing it with Mr Buttons is quite different from what I’m used to. And the guy who came out and helped me, Hamish, explained to me that riding school horses, they often have quite a wide margin of error. And my experience of them is that they usually lift their legs up for you very easily. As soon as you give any indication that that’s what you want them to do, you just barely touch a leg and they’re lifting it for you. But my horse, Mr Buttons, is a younger horse and especially when combined with my level of experience, there’s a much narrower margin of error.

And Hamish just showed me step by step what to do, explaining the reasons behind each of the actions that he was taking, which was just so useful. We also worked on some groundwork where you’re just directing the horse to move in certain ways but you’re not riding the horse while this is happening. You’re just saying, “Take a few steps back. Stop moving or move in small circles.” And it’s just all using the position of your body, using a lead rope, in this case, and as well as your verbal commands.

And with each thing you’re asking them to do, they’re learning. They’re learning, okay, so when you stand like that, this is what you want me to do. When you move your arm, you want me to do this. And then when you move the rope like that, this is what you want me to do. And when you make that noise, I go forwards but when you make that other noise, that means you want me to take a step backwards. So we’re doing all of this together.

And the biggest takeaway from this lesson wasn’t just about handling his legs or specific things with the groundwork. It was about the principle of persistence. Hamish taught me to keep asking until Mr Buttons did what was being asked of him, to give him enough opportunities to figure out what I was asking. So we were trying to get him to take a step back, just one step. But initially he had no idea that’s what we were asking him to do, and he kept moving sideways. So he was just thinking, this is what you want me to do. You’re asking me to do something. I’m going to move sideways.

He was trying to figure it out, and Hamish just kept asking him in this very calm, clear way. That way it was clear that he wasn’t actually being asked to move to the side. And it also gave him enough opportunities for him to try something else and to figure it out. And eventually he tried something else. He took a step back ever so slightly, and then we stopped asking him. And we just gave him some time to process what happened, gave him the space to think, I did the thing that they were asking me to do. And I gave him a reward of a scratch on his withers.

And all of this lets him know that he did the thing that we wanted him to do. Now, there were lots of things that were important in that process but the one I wanted to emphasise today is that we gave him enough opportunities to succeed. Are you giving yourself enough chances to succeed or are you setting yourself up with the unrealistic expectation that you should get it right on the first try?

And if you don’t get it right on the first try, whatever that even means, then that means things about you as a person, that you’re not good at whatever it is, and that you won’t succeed. That you haven’t got what it takes and that you never will etc, etc, whatever your brain tells you in those circumstances. But maybe you’re just like Mr Buttons. Maybe you just haven’t figured it out yet. That is the key word, you haven’t figured it out yet and you just need enough opportunities to keep going until you do.

Can you let it be that simple, as simple as giving yourself the opportunity to learn and adapt without casting judgement on your initial attempts, especially those courageous attempts, which we always want to celebrate, that you gave it a go. Success requires persistence and patience and the willingness to give yourself enough opportunities to figure it out. Can you give yourself that grace as you are going through this process? Alright, my friends, that is it for today. I will catch you next time.

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, The Flow Collective, where you get my best resources and all the coaching you need to transform your inner and outer life. Sign up to the waitlist at theflowcollective.co/join, and I’ll see you in the community.