Self Application
Think of one of the major goals you are currently working on. Can you identify something related to your goal that you are avoiding? For instance, you might have a goal of building own coaching practice but keep avoiding any on-line marketing. Among the explanations you would have for your avoiding behaviour could be, for example, your belief that you are too ‘non-technical’ for the on-line activities or that you don’t trust on-line available information or that you hate spamming others or indeed any combination of the above explanations plus more. Can you list your own explanations for something you are avoiding in relation to your goal?
Benefits of avoidance
You can translate what you have in your list into the benefits of your avoidance, e.g. in case of avoiding on-line marketing your benefits could be that you do not spam other people and you do not spend lots of your valuable time on entering the new and overwhelming technical area of doing things on-line. Benefits of avoidance are important to address because if you choose to develop a more explorative behaviour you would need to come up with the actions that would address your current benefits provided by avoidance. Thus, to save your valuable time you may choose to outsource all the technical part to a corresponding professional.
‘Catastrophising’, the worst case scenario
Now think about your actually entering the area you’ve been avoiding. With the natural human tendency to ‘catastropize’ things, it would be easy for you to come up with the worst case scenario of what could happen. Set your imagination free and let this scenario look really bad and scary.
When you are ready with your worst case scenario, look back at each of the scary things in your list and think how likely each of these to happen. Michael Bungay-Stanier suggests putting corresponding probabilities (from 0 to 1, e.g. 0.2 means 20% and 1 means 100%) next to each of the events you imagined. Please, multiply the probabilities of those events that you imagined would happen together to see how probable you worst case scenario is. For example, the worst case scenario for starting on-line marketing could encompass publishing your post in a wrong place (with probability, say, 0.2) and having people laughing at you (0, 05). But how realistic is this danger really? By multiplying 0.2 by 0.05 we are getting 0.01, i.e. 1%!
Best possible scenario
Now let us turn to another extreme and imagine the best case scenario of your entering the very area you are avoiding. Leave aside for a while how would you enter it, just think about and list for yourselves all the benefits. Thus, one of the benefits of starting on-line marketing could be a much wider reach of potential customers and even serving them on-line with your one-to-many programs versus one-on-one coaching you’ve been doing before.
Costs of avoidance
Having created the best case scenario, consider for yourselves what are the possible future costs of your not exploring and continuing avoiding that very area? Do list your potential losses and essentially decreased wins. Using Jim Rohn’s famous expression, do you really want to wait until you are handed the bill for not trying? It’s worth taking the question seriously and spending enough time reflecting on all you have written so far before answering it.
The magic of goal
Provided your bill for not trying is high enough, you may want to consider exploring previously avoided things. But how to take the first step towards an overwhelmingly new area? As already discussed, your well defined goals can be of great support for you here. If you haven’t done it before, describe your goal in as many details as possible, truly visualize for yourselves your desired life upon reaching your goal and then capture it on paper. Aim at 3 to 5 pages. Then read it through editing and adding if needed. What title would you give to what you’ve just written? You might want to redefine the statement defining your goal to better reflect your future aspirations. When formulated clearly, our goals have a power of pulling us towards themselves motivating and energizing us and helping to overcome difficulties. No magic really but a great power of clarity on what we want to achieve.