Question: what do you do when at first you don’t succeed?

That’s right, the answer is you pick yourself up and you try again.

But here’s the approach I suggest — instead of doing the same thing, try something different!  Wow, what a concept. Yet think of how often we just keep barreling ahead with the same tactics, hoping that if we persist long enough and hard enough we’ll break through.

This “answer” or technique applies to pretty much every situation in life. In fact, I can’t think of an example where it won’t apply, so please let me know in the “comments” section if you do know of a situation where tweaking your approach won’t give you a fresh new chance of succeeding.

Even with a child learning to walk, they progress from turning over to sitting up to pulling themself upright to cruising around the room holding onto furniture… until one day they are miraculously able to walk unaided!  They don’t try to go from lying supine to walking upright (and yet how often do we expect to bypass the inbetween stages of a project?). Instinctively, they know the process to follow, building their strength and skill along the way at each stage, and never giving up despite tumbles, falls and “owies” (as in ouch, not ‘I owe, I owe and off to work I go’)

It can be a huge stress when you have a big goal and can’t seem to get the results you want. But keep going day by day, doing the different things you need to do to reach your goal line. And if you realize you’ve been beating your head against a solid brick wall by pushing one particular method down one particular avenue, stop and assess your situation. See if tweaking your method or trying a new path won’t be just the thing you need to reach your goal, maybe in a different way than you originally planned but you’ll reach it instead of giving up.

your happiness guru,

Evelyn Brooks