Isn’t it true that results we achieve that come about by surprise bring a greater sense of satisfaction than results that take huge effort to achieve?  It certainly is for me.  In contrast, the results I get that take weeks or months of effort always seem to be more of a relief than an achievement should feel.

Building Up to Success

Often I feel that personal development can be one of those areas where you have a long time building up to success.  Change takes effort and making changes often comes at a price of long term dedication to tirelessly keep working away to change habits and to bring about change.  Not only a single change at a time, but in fact, many many changes combined can have the same effect of adding up to be a long term effort. For me there is certainly a combination at work with this type of experience as on one hand, my persistence to change I know will overcome whatever obstacles I face and on the other it can be disappointing when it takes as long as it does.  This certainty in achievement is a great confidence to build up and helps you tackle all of those unknown situations and obstacles.  Building that kind of confidence only occurs through repeated successes over time and having the ability to recognize achievement and be grateful for it.  After all, if you don’t know what success looks like along the way, then you certainly can’t build those successes up into self confidence.  Success and confidence can become a repeating cycle and what I’ve found is that it can actually become an insignificant event when achieving that success becomes expected simply due to your persistence. This kind of drawn out achievement being expected by a person eventually seems quite meaningless and in fact, it becomes the normal way of building up to success.

Achieving It!

So with all this building up to success there comes the point where you actually achieve what you were after.  If it was a long drawn out process this point may feel more like a relief than anything.  The work associated with this achievement could be gone now and that might be similar to having a chore or some other painful tasks gone forever.  However, the achievements that seem to feel the best and give you the biggest ‘high’ are the ones that come suddenly or unexpectedly.  There is no time passed to destroy your pleasure with an associated heavy workload and so the gratification that exists can be so much higher!  I know that any achievements that come my way out of surprise are often an opportunity to discover something new about myself where I am shocked to learn of some new skill or impact I had to help me achieve it.  It’s a joy to learn of these things and exciting to know that sometimes there is a great achievement just around the corner we don’t expect!

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