Pausing and Persisting for Powerful Productivity

If you want to turn your current life into your desired lifestyle, there are two opposing but equally important skills you’re going to need to master. Whether you’re wanting to build a successful coaching business, increase your work-life balance, get yourself into better physical health, or turn your passion project into a reality, you’ll need to master the skills of persisting and pausing.

Persisting is one of the most crucial skills of success. It’s what keeps you pressing ahead in 

spite of repeated failed attempts. And if you’re wanting to accomplish something meaningful you’re going to have to keep on getting back up and trying again and again, persistently, until you achieve your outcome.

Persistence might show up in the form of continuing to invite people to work with you after receiving a couple of no’s/silence, continuing to post on social media even though you haven’t been getting as many responses as you’d like, working out at the gym over and over to get that first pull up, or practicing remaining calm in a situation that typically would trigger you. 

The opposite would be to give up. To get knocked down and stay down. And to give up is the easiest way to bring your probability of success down to 0%. Have you ever given up on a desired goal too quickly whereas if you would have persisted you’d likely have achieved your outcome? How strong is your power of persistence? Is it something you would benefit from cultivating more in your life?

On the other hand, if we keep persisting persistently without pausing we put ourselves on the fast track to burn out and even injury. While persistence is key for success, pausing allows us necessary time to rest, reflect, and recover. Sometimes we need a purposeful pause to reflect on our approach. Sometimes we need a pause just to recover vitality before our next attempt.  And sometimes a pause is necessary to reflect on the viability of our overall outcome. A pause might show up as taking a good night’s sleep before starting back with persistence, taking a day off from exercise to allow your muscles to recover, or taking a vacation from work once or twice per year to refresh your mind.

Which of these opposite yet complimentary skills are you better at? Are you more skilled at persistence, perhaps pushing yourself too hard making yourself more prone to burn out, injury, or fighting forward towards highly improbable outcomes without adequate reflection?

Are you more skilled at pausing? Perhaps too much so that you can potentially push yourself into procrastination, inaction, and a lack of consistency and momentum? 

What is your next step for sustainable productivity, outcome achievement, and your next level  self-mastery?

Persisting and pausing are two of the core skills necessary for an optimized peak productivity over the long run so you can maximize the probability of creating your desired lifestyle, and enjoy the journey more along the way. 

While persisting you’ll also need the ability to turn flow states on and off on command if you’d like to perform at your peak without wasting any vitality unnecessarily.  You’ll need systems for getting clear on your long term vision and building the proper milestones back to the present to make sure that the actions you are persisting on are aligned with your long-term success metrics. 

You’ll also need systems for tracking whether or not your daily actions are on target with your weekly outcomes, and aligned with your monthly, quarterly, and annual goals, all being in alignment with your larger life vision. And you’ll need feedback loops for receiving and integrating feedback so you will know when to persist, when to pause, and when to pivot.

Lastly, you’ll need systems for building a stable and resilient core within yourself so that regardless of the inevitable ups and downs in the outside world, you can maintain persistence, remaining in the game and on target.

These are all of the core skills for creating the lifestyle you desire, in a comfortable and sustainable way, while enjoying the journey. These are the skills we train you to develop within our Self-Leadership Certification + INSIDERS Accelerator.  Ready to step into the driver’s seat and accelerate your journey to making it happen? Comment “PERSIST” below and I’ll show you how, and let us know your reflections and realizations in the comment below.