Progress is Hard to See When You Are in a Hole

When you realize you need to change something in your life, it’s often because you’re dissatisfied with your current situation. Change requires significant energy and determination, and frequently, the pain of staying the same must outweigh the effort of changing. This means that when you decide to change, you’re typically not in a great place to start with.

You feel like you are starting in a hole.

I love using this metaphor when working with clients to help visualize what progress looks like. When you’re in a hole, the only way to fix it is to fill it in. To get out, you must sit with the circumstances that got you into the hole in the first place.

So, you’re in a hole and need to “fill it in” to get out. Seems easy enough, right? But when you address the problems, start to heal, improve, and build new habits, you’re still in a hole! This is what progress looks like. There isn’t a magic pill or wand that makes this go away once you recognize the problem—you have to work through it. You have to stay in the hole as you’re filling it in, which can feel like a Sisyphean task.

My mom always used to tell me, “The only way through it is through it.” Once you get comfortable with this idea, the real work begins. But how do you stay motivated? As leaders, we often have to hold this motivation ourselves. We’re good at hyping others up, but it’s not always the same for ourselves. We are our hardest critics and then need to be our own hype-person, which typically is a formula for disaster.

So, how do we overcome this? We intentionally measure and give ourselves easy wins. We, as humans, need to win. We don’t need to win all the time, but if you were on a baseball team that always lost, the chances that you would quit are pretty high.

My all-time favorite book about this is The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. They write, “Most people, especially highly ambitious people, are unhappy because of what they measure themselves against. We all have an ideal, which is like a moving target always out of reach. When we measure ourselves against our ideal, we’re in ‘The Gap.’ However, when we measure ourselves against our previous selves—the person we were when we set our goals and ideals—we will be in ‘The Gain.’”

If you’re in a hole and looking out, you’re seeing the gap. We need to build in progress markers to show your gain. You need to set goals in the hole to show how you are filling it in. And then you need to celebrate those wins! If you don’t take the time to see what you have done along the way, this will be the most exhausting and draining experience of your life, and you will probably quit and just stay in the hole.

Leadership is a journey, not a destination. We don’t know what we will encounter as we embark on this quest, and more than likely, it will not go as we first thought it would. When it does not go as planned and you are so focused on what did not go right, you will miss all of the things that did go right and the new opportunities that you never could have imagined.

So, if you feel like you’re in a hole, welcome! We all have a hole we feel like we need to get out of. Be kind to yourself and start giving yourself some easy wins to show your progress and remind yourself that you can get out of the hole.