Winning at the Shooting Range: layering for success
Your success at the shooting range depends on the size of your target, distance from the target, the gun, your experience (pretty much nil for me), and many other conditions.
Even if you don’t shoot (though I don’t have anything at all against shooting, I don’t shoot), there’s something in this metophor that might help you.
Success, with shooting or practically anything else, depends on your process. We all need varying levels of success. We won’’t succeed at one thing all the time. So, we need to set multiple targets.
Let’s take the target range metphor again. Imagine you put your paper target six centimeters away from the end of your gun. You couldn’t possibly miss. So, that won’t do a lot for your self-esteem. But, it you set the target twenty feet away, it’s not very challenging - but it could be just what you need for that day.
I think it’s good for humans to have multiple targets with varying levels of difficulty, time to completion, and varying levels of dependency.
We all have a mental report card. Let’s look at mine for today. I’m not going to assign a grade but I’m going to assign how I feel toward myself as far as hitting my target. This isn’t entirely fair.
No one joined a planned meditation session. There’s a ton of reasons they couldn’t attend: all of them are super-busy and uber-responsible people. There’s no reason to feel any blame. But, you know humans are.
Right now, I have some trivial tasks to complete. They won’t bring any great sense of accomplishment apart from checking them off my list (and keeping other family members happy).
- Get the tires and oil checked.
- Prepare a meditation.
I also have some shorter range but personally important tasks to complete.
- Transfer all my articles from my old website backup to my new website (here).
- Make sure my new site looks good and functions well.
- Complete the second class in my Positive Psychology class from the University of Pennsylvania (about two hours of work).
- Do a little display for Halloween (breaks down into getting parts and then assembling parts). Long term goals:
- Complete one podcast within the next three weeks.
- Plan for a second podcast.
- Complete a learning session.
My point here is this. There are lots of things I can be doing at any point in time. Almost all of them will improve my sense of thriving, health, happiness, and success.
If you want to feel more confidence and self-esteem, maintain multiple layers of activities (both pleasures and accomplishments). If something falls through, there are other things to pick you up. Move the targets moving. Also, take it a little easy on yourself.