Cumulative Progress
Cumulative Progress
At the beginning of every year, I take a few people through a visioning program — this is the last live coaching cohort, so I decided to work them through my decade visioning process.
I found out over the last three years that people had more anxiety from looking at their goals than they felt ignorant about setting one. If the anxiety is the problem, then that is what needs fixing.
In 2018, I unconsciously created a tool called the Do Note — I tracked my whole year, including days when I was languorous.
At the end of each week, I noticed what consumed my time the most and how it fed into the next day and the remainder of the week. By the end of some months, I knew my work pattern and my discipline format.
By the end of that year, my success was exponential — all I did was to daily hold myself accountable by having physical documentation of my actual day, not my imaginary day.
Our problems with goal setting have nothing to do with goal setting but our inability to track goal achievement. We wait for gigantic external displays of our goals when we have realistically surpassed our goals.
One significant thing I noticed that year was that I had things I succeeded at that were neither in my year’s goal nor were they on my daily to-do list. A good example was reading four hours or researching at least three nights a week. Another was working on the Direct Investors Summit of Nigeria; they just happened! I only continued after I noticed the trajectory.
The funny thing about unplanned success is that we zoom past them, upset about the planned successes that never happened while forgetting that the unplanned success also took unplanned resources.
Am I asking you to live and see where life takes you? No! I woke up to write— this piece is not random. However, if you pay attention, you will realize that your intentional moves bring you to some unintentional places.
This tracking principle applies to successes and responsibilities; we unconsciously pick up responsibilities we never planned for. If you do not track how much you are doing, your workload can significantly multiply in three months by volunteering to take up additional weekly tasks.
This tells me again that your goals are frightening not because of themselves but because of the deviations you are susceptible to taking as the days go by.
What are your standards for picking up new responsibilities? How would you practically trace if you have taken too many new responsibilities aside from feeling overwhelmed?
My team and I created a tool last year called the Messiah Complex workbook on the back of the messiah complex four-part podcast series to help you identify where you have consciously and unconsciously taken on too much work and why you felt the need to take on that much work.
You may not have taken on too much but might have allowed yourself to overlook the tiny steps of progress (planned and unplanned) you keep making.
To that effect, I invite you to get a diary to track the life you live. This will help you track your routines, successes, and tendencies — free diagnosis if you ask me.
How cumulative progress affects your healing
Coaching, Counselling and Therapy are not magic wands that wipe out your past or rewrite your future.
Over the weekend, I had the privilege of explaining the job of a sex therapist to someone this way:
It is like trying to run into your future, and even though you are increasing your speed, getting all the motivation and taking your vitamins, you seem to be in the same spot. You could eventually break off harshly from what was pulling you from behind and get injured because it was done forcefully and at top speed, or you could get a therapist.
A therapist goes into your past with you to find the strong knot that is tying you to your past and then begins to detangle that. The more you detangle the past, the more you will have freedom of movement and expression in your present.
Sometimes, your ability to move is not a lack of goal setting but an emotional knotting up that makes you immobile regardless of the present motivation.
A coach is the person who encourages, guides and empowers you now that the past has lost its hold on you. A coach knows where you are trying to go because they have taken other people there.
They know what it feels like to have wanted something for a long time and not get it. They are the ones to help you overcome your feeling of being late to the party, apathy towards your dreams and feeling like an impostor upon succeeding.
Where a therapist saves your life, a coach builds your life.
If you must heal correctly, you must be willing to set healing goals, but much more, track your journey so you can see what is going on and the unplanned progress or regressions you are making.
Journal therapy is a tool I give every client because I understand the power of self-tracking. If you track yourself frequently, you will begin to know what words mean what and what behaviours mean what.
Over the last three years, whenever I watched movies for longer than four hours at a stretch, it was a sign that I had an emotional situation I was unwilling to confront. I may delay getting to my journal, but I will get to it and write until I can name the problem — my therapist is likely not going to know that until it escalated or until I work up the nerve to tell.
The best gift you will give yourself as you heal is self-tracking. Track your thoughts, track your thirst and desires, track your ambition, track your goals, track when you are horny, track your health, track everything you can because the cumulative of those tiny things make up your life — you might as well take it seriously.
If you have a question, ask me.