What To Do When Nothing Is Working? One Millimeter Can Make All The Difference

When things aren’t going our way, when things are going very badly, it is easy for us to lose the one thing that has the ability to help us get ourselves out of the ditch: hope. The worse our situation gets, the worse we feel, the more negative our thoughts become and the more difficult changing for the better becomes.

What we fail to realize is the point at which we went astray. Most of us make the mistake of believing that things went awry when some unexpected and unpleasant event threw us into a tailspin.

In actuality, the event had nothing to do with us falling off our track. Sure, it may have been the catalyst—but when things continuously go wrong and we find ourselves off our wanted track, the only person that we have to blame is us.

Things did not go wrong when we came up against a difficult situation or our very own failure—things went wrong when we doubted our own abilities and took a small defeat to mean the end of the war altogether. Things didn’t go to shit when you had a really bad day; they went to shit when you allowed that bad day to change your positive outlook.

This change from the positive to the negative was what caused you to veer away from the path that you chose for yourself. It sounds silly, but the smallest change, the tiniest millimeter of alteration to your mindset makes all the difference in your future projectile outcome.

Look at it this way: you have managed to find the path that you wish to travel—this being a difficult enough task in itself—and you set your course. The course that you wish to travel is a straight path from where you are currently situated to where you want to be.

Now, life has a tendency of making things a bit more difficult for us—not out of spite but out of love, teaching us important lessons that will help us achieve our goals. These roadblocks can be surpassed as long as we keep our eyes—our focus—in the right direction.

These roadblocks can come in many different forms. You may be having relationship issues with your lover, you may have illness in the family, you may even be having issues at work. Or, and this one tends to hit us the hardest, you tried your hand at a task and failed. All of these bumps along the road, these little failures, can sometimes be transformed by our mind into great defeats.

Allowing ourselves to feel defeat, to accept defeat, requires a change in our mindset—a change in the way we view the task ahead of us and the way that we view our abilities. It is one thing to fail and it is another to be defeated. Failures are commonplace along the path. Defeat is the end of the road. Feeling defeat causes us to doubt ourselves; doubt is our worst enemy.

What we focus on in our mind, what we believe and what we will are all the same thing and are what decide our fate. Doubting yourself is creating a negative energy that will flow from you and consume the world around you.

Negativity paints the world that you see--your world--a darker color. Everything begins to seem cold and bleak and what you believe your chances of success are, begin to dwindle. If you don’t believe that you will succeed then it is impossible for you to succeed.

Success is not found, it is created. In order to create anything, you need to have a vision of it first. You have to have some sort of understanding of where you want to go—a positive outlook and understanding of the road ahead of you.

Keeping positive, believing that you will succeed, is necessary to creating success. There is only a millimeter of difference between having a positive outlook on life versus a negative one—such a slim difference that changing from one to the other happens seamlessly without notice.

Most of us will start out with positive thoughts and then at some point down the road, make a transition to the negative. If we are sharp and know ourselves well enough, we will catch this change and hopefully have to strength to veer back on track. However, most of us will give into feeling sorry for ourselves and sulk in our own despair.

This millimeter of change causes us to veer miles off course in the long run. A millimeter of change off the straight course you need to travel may only be one degree off in the wrong direction—but travelling one degree off for years will leave you nowhere near your hoped for destination.

Success requires positive thinking and believing that you are not only capable of succeeding, but that you will succeed. Shit happens. Not to just you, but to all of us. We all have our will power and strength tested on a regular basis. Instead of dreading that fact, find comfort in it.

Realize that the more crap that you overcome, the stronger you will become, the better you will become and the more you will be proud of yourself for when you do achieve the success you dreamt of. One millimeter makes all the difference.

Paul Hudson | Elite. 

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