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Here's the Deal
As your dreams become schemes, you'll begin itching to make them come true. This signals Phase 3, the implementation stage of the change process. Phase 3is when you stop fantasizing about selling your art and start submitting work to galleries, or go beyond ogling a friend's brother to having her set you up on a date. You'll feel motivated to do real, physical things to build a new life. And then…(drum roll, please)…you'll fail. Repeatedly.
I've gone through Phase 3many times and watched hundreds of clients do the same. I've never seen a significant scheme succeed on the first try. Re-forming your life, like anything new, complex, and important, inevitably brings up problems you didn't expect. That's why, in contrast to the starry eyes that are so useful in Phase 2, Phase 3demands the ingenuity of Thomas Edison and the tenacity of a pit bull.
What to Do
- Expect things to go wrong. Many of my clients have an early failure and consider this a sign that "it just wasn't meant to be." This is a useful philosophy if you want to spend your life as person soup. To become all that you can be, you must keep working toward your dreams even when your initial efforts are unsuccessful.
- Be willing to start over. Every time your plans fail, you'll briefly return to Phase 1, feeling lost and confused. This is an opportunity to release some of the illusions that created hitches in your plan.
- Revisit Phase 2, adjusting your dreams and schemes to include the truths you've learned from your experimentation.
- Persist. Keep debugging and reimplementing your new-and-improved plans until they work. If you've followed all the steps above, they eventually will.
