When The Going Gets Tough Here’s How To Keep Going

The learning I am about to share with you was hard won this week. But I’m sensing you’ll value it, and that perhaps you’ve had a time when you felt like giving up on something even though you had told everyone you would do it. I’m talking about when you take on something that demands you continue stretching out of your comfort zone, maybe a goal you are working towards and for which you find yourself on the long haul. When it inevitably all starts to get too hard, self-doubt and overwhelm can hurtle you to near rock bottom. Well, that was my past week anyway. Until a movie slung a ladder down the hole I’d fallen into.

We Bought a Zoo is the true story about Benjamin, an adventure journalist who buys a property with a dilapidated and shut-down zoo on it, and sets about the huge task of refurbishing it and reopening by a non-negotiable deadline. Along the way, and without knowing anything about how to run a zoo or look after the animals, he encounters a series of mishaps and one or two humans whose agenda is that he quit.

The more the plot unfolded, the more I saw a replay of my week on the long road to a goal of mine.

My “zoo” is the creative project of my book and its launch, the publishing industry my unknown terrain. My “animals’’ in danger of being put down and unable to touch the hearts of people if I do not proceed and deliver, are the words in my manuscript. They will die and with them their message, if my creation does not get birthed into the world.

It is the same for all our creations or goals.   

And yet, disheartening me at every turn this week, were my own thoughts, and also my version of the zoo’s health and safety inspector during a free skype call with an industry professional committed to putting up obstacles for me by insisting I rewrite my book (because “’memoirs don’t sell from first-time authors”), spend way more time on social media than I want to, and make everything in my life from hereon in be about my launch.

My heart sank.

It had been hard enough bashing up against my comfort zone all week as I prepared to launch my first ever online course. Now this!

I sat on the bottom stair and bawled.

“What’s the point?”  

The raging bear in me wanted to escape the constraints to my spirit with how I was supposed to do things. I lashed out, ending up in an argument with my husband. The snakes escaped their proverbial casket, forked tongues laced with venom. The ageing tiger in me, those limiting thoughts and beliefs that caused me pain and didn’t serve my highest good, needed to be put down. But I resisted, fought against taking the power out of them and instead succumbed to believing I was not good enough, that I didn’t have what it takes, and would suffer the public humiliation of failure.

And all the while, I had a version of Benjamin’s brother in my head that wouldn’t go away.

Just quit. 
Get out now. 
Abandon ship. 
This will never go anywhere. 
Don’t waste your time.    

Grief clutched at my heart. I had a gift and a talent, yet at the same time I didn’t feel I could jump through all the hoops that lay ahead of me to usher that gift into the world.  All I could see was failure up ahead and failure if I quit right now.

That’s why the end of the movie was gold. 

Finally the day came for them to open the zoo. Not knowing if any visitors would show up, Benjamin cut the ribbon and made a speech:

‘’It’s not about where an adventure ends, because that’s not what an adventure is about. Anything else now, is a bonus!”

BINGO!

For months, Benjamin had so focused on his end-result of opening the zoo. Yet when he arrived at that point he remembered something.

Adventures aren’t about the destination.

They are about the ride we go on when we say ‘’yes’’ to something!

As long as we are only focused on getting to our ‘’end-result’’ and on making that a means to an end, well then we can forget that we are even on an adventure! Worse still, is that we don’t even choose to see it that way. We just fixate on the end goal and getting to that point, and what we think it means about us and our success or whatever.

But what happens if we make adventure our highest end-result?

Where the opening of a zoo or the bringing forth of some other creation, is what gets the adventure of ‘’being on the ride’’ even going?

Maybe then we can get back to more fun, lighten up. Sure, there is a destination up ahead, but what matters most is simply being on the ride and all that we get to see, create, experience, and give birth to along the way.

We re-open our heart to this and so come alive again.

We get to receive our adventure.

As Benjamin knows…anything else after that, is a bonus

What about you: What is your relationship with adventure? With the long haul? With quitting? A new course is brewing in me right now so I would love to hear your responses to these questions.

As always, if you loved this message today, please share my Note freely on your social networks. Thank you with appreciation!