The Fallacy of the “Provider”

Thanks to Will Meyerhofer of “The People’s Therapist” for giving a great glimpse into the life of the “Provider.”  Although the article focuses on a male attorney, in this day and age, the provider could be anyone: male or female, black or white, gay or straight.  What is so profound about this article is how it captures the life that many of us aspire to only to be sorely disappointed.  We think the 2.5 kids (or dogs), the house (that is double the size of previous generations) and a country club membership are the end goals only to find out that our current path will only allow us these luxuries at the expense of the time or the energy to enjoy them.

I am the first to say that being wealthy or enjoying luxuries does not require you to sell your soul.  Many people have started businesses, invested wisely or work in industries they love to acquire these things.   However, as a lawyer whose industry enjoys among the lowest job ratings imaginable, I can say first hand that we often abdicate our ability to change our paths and define a new role.

Wanting to provide for your family should not come at the expense of your family. The craziest thing is that often times the people you are “providing” for only want basic comforts and you.  We have created an alternate perception of reality and our desires that is killing our enjoyment and happiness.

At the end of his piece, Will gives us a rather simple but often hard to execute directive: “Re-frame your life a series of conscious choices.  Ask yourself if you want to be doing what you are doing.”   We can have better lives, better marriages, better children and better careers if we make a conscious choice to stop trying to fulfill a role and to start fulfilling ourselves.

Winning Through Failure

Confession: Each month this year, I’ve set a 30 day goal. And each time I’ve failed to meet it.

In January, I did a 30 day trial of the Slow Carb diet. Although I wrote about it as simply a trial period of the diet from The Four Hour Body, within my mastermind group it was my goal to drop 12 pounds. I shed nine, which I’m not complaining about, but I also failed to hit what I set as my goal.

For February, I was going to do Crossfit for the month. I went to my first session where they decided that I would do three daily workouts in one session to start things off. The website said nothing about that – I thought I was coming in to learn the moves. And it particularly turned me off, since it’s the exact opposite of what I’ve tried to preach on this blog about starting small. Plus, I could barely walk for a week. So I set my goal to work out each and every day of the month (even if it was no more than a 1.5 mile jog) as soon as I could walk again. And I kept it up from February 8th until the last weekend of the month, when I missed on February 26th. I didn’t quite make it, but I was obviously in better shape than I was at the beginning of the month.

March’s goal was a repeat of February’s: work out each day. Didn’t even come close. 21 of 31 days. But I can feel my running speed getting faster, so I’m now looking at 5K race schedules so I can see if this is the year I get my best time ever. Going to shoot for a 10K personal record as well.

I mentioned the fact that I’d failed to make any of my 30 day goals in 2011 so far to a friend of mine. She asked me if it was demoralizing in any way to not make my goals. Which makes sense. If you are constantly setting goals and continually failing to achieve them, won’t it weigh on your self-esteem? Doesn’t it hurt to repeatedly miss your goals?

I remember setting and missing goals in the first year of our mastermind group’s existence. It was an incredibly frustrating experience. We would each come into a meeting and state numerous things that we fully intended to accomplish over the following two weeks. And then we’d show up two weeks later with our heads hung in shame as we confessed to only having completed half of what we set out to do. We even created a spreadsheet that we updated each meeting where the goals you achieved were colored green while the ones you failed were colored red. We’d update and circulate the spreadsheet after each meeting as if we could shame each other into achieving our respective goals. Red squares were failures, no matter how close we got to the goal. And as further punishment, we’d pay money into a pot for each missed goal.

Two things happened that changed the way we felt about missing our goals, about our failures. One – we redefined how we look at failure itself. We stopped looking at things in black and white – failures or successes. For example, my “failures” this year have me thinking about setting personal records in some races and giving myself a shot of endorphins on a consistent basis. Is aiming to lose 10 pounds but losing 9 a failure? Second, we realized that we didn’t want to hit all of our goals each time we set them. We just thought we wanted to hit all our goals. We originally thought that 100% goal achievement would be the sign that we were doing well as a mastermind group. We figured we were doing our job of holding each other accountable only when we were all reporting back that we accomplished everything we said we’d do at the previous meeting. We gradually came to the realization that if we’re hitting our goals each and every time, we’re probably not setting very hard goals. The point is not to give yourself a gold star or a pat on the back for a job well done. The point is growth. The point is consistent improvement. The point is to always get better.

To get better at anything, you have to be aiming for a place that is just beyond the edge of your current ability. For example, if you want to be able to lift more weight in the gym, you have to lift some weights close to the maximum you can currently lift. You have to work right up to the line where you know you will fail. In fact, getting stronger requires the occasional failure. You must fail to get stronger. People who don’t fail don’t grow.

Armed with this new perspective, we’ve loosened our focus on whether our goal is achieved or not. We’ve done away with the spreadsheet of red and green boxes. We’ve even congratulated each other after some particularly nice failures. It’s not that we don’t still try our hardest to hit our goals each month. It’s not that we’re not disappointed in ourselves when we don’t achieve what we said we’d do. It’s that we’ve accepted that failure is a natural, and yes, a necessary part of our growth. And when you’re no longer afraid of failure, you aim higher. When you aim high but miss your goal, you may still fail better than other people succeed. So to answer my friend’s question… my current failures have me feeling pretty good.