Persistence is the ability to maintain to continue an action regardless of what we feel. Sometimes it is misinterpreted with stubbornness. Though both are part of the character of a person, persistence often leads to patience and a better approach in life, stubbornness becomes stressful as we pressurize ourselves to achieve something without knowing the reason behind it many times.
To start with, every one of us will have some goals in life may it be small or big. It may be associated with a career, or our health, or the lifestyle we want or the life on the whole. To be peacefully happy in life is also one goal that is not easy to achieve. It requires a push to ignore negativity and take things in a positive notion, despite we get hurt many times.
But what is that pushes us to reach the goal matters? It is often said motivated people achieve things easily as they find a reason to push themselves. But this reason alone cannot produce results. We need the action to pursue our goal to achieve what we want in life. To be precise, we need a regular, consistent, continuous push that motivates us, which is called persistence. Patience and persistence go hand and hand. We have to keep working on the specific goal; the zeal of small results during the process pushes us further ahead. For instance, when our goal is our health and we decide to shed some weight down, it is not an easy process as we say and it requires a dedicated workout, clean eating, and curbing the cravings for our favorite food. But after a couple of weeks, if the weighing machine pointer moves a point left, it would pay off for all the difficulties and the visual result would encourage us on a persistent and patient wait for the ultimate goal.
And the most important is there is a list of things that we may have to follow when we persistently strive for a goal. First is to believe that the only control over an individual is one own self. Despite people throwing stones to embarrass us, demotivate the goal or dream that we pursue, we need to move forward with blindfolded eyes, deaf ears, and dumb mouths to make the goal realistic which would speak instead of explaining them the reason to achieve the goal. Ultimately, holding up responsibility on oneself by refusing the discouraging acts of others may power us up to reach greater heights. The second important step is to enjoy the process of achieving the goal. Taking up struggles, pain, and adversaries in the same way as we do relish our happy moments would make us better in terms of strength of facing lives, wiser approach in problem-solving, making us more patient, persistent, humble, and empathetic in our approach. And finally, it is essential to ensure that we take one step at a time. This helps in stabilizing the current step and eliminates the requirement of turning back once after we move forward.
But, can we persistently keep working and waiting for the goal to become a reality? This is one question that commonly arises when we constantly strive for something. The answer is a definite no. We step out of the consistent path when the goal no longer aspires us or when we lose interest in the process when we don’t achieve partial targets beyond the threshold point of one’s patience and persistence. These are the two main factors that may force us to quit from a process. However, before deciding to quit the process, we need to clinch that our plans for reaching the goal were right though we are persistent. If not, we have to check if changes in the approach may help us in reaching the target. If none of the achievable options works, then we may quit. Nevertheless, there is nothing to worry about this failure, as failures are always stepping-stone to success. This would teach us better approaches in life, help us deciding our interests, and fixing goals that are interesting, aspiring, and achievable. Most importantly, this would teach us on handling failures.
Life is a journey! Keep Travelling! Keep enjoying the best and the worst moments! We would take only those memories with us when it is time for us to bid a bye to this mortal life.
