I talked recently about how I’ve started taking an Emotional Resilience class in my ward. Each week, we set five goals to work on for that week. The following week, we individually rate how we did with each goal. You can pick “very little effort,” “some effort,” or “significant effort.” The first two weeks, I felt like I had pretty good success with my goals. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like I’ve done as well the last two weeks with my goals.
Things Started So Well
The first week, many of my goals involved focusing on gratitude. This meant being grateful toward Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ as well as expressing gratitude toward people in my life who have helped me. I made it a goal to express gratitude toward at least one different person every day that week. At the end of the week, I felt good about what I’d accomplished. It felt like a great success. The second week, I felt like I had similar success. I reached my goals. I felt like I could do this.
Then Achieving Success Got a Bit Harder
Then the third week came along. The class was about establishing healthy habits (exercise, eating healthy, getting enough sleep, and such) to help with emotional resilience. I set goals involving getting to bed earlier and establishing an exercise routine early in the morning. They didn’t seem like too hard of goals.
Unfortunately, small things quickly got in the way of achieving these two goals. Family members stayed at our house late, making it difficult or impossible to get to bed as early as I had planned. A friend made a spontaneous visit and slept in the room where we keep the exercise equipment. Other early morning commitments make it difficult to get in my exercise first thing. At the end of the week, I wouldn’t say I completely failed at my goals, but I definitely didn’t feel like I’d found the success I got the first two weeks.
Maybe Feeling Like I’ve Failed is Really Success
As I made my way through this week’s goals, which involve goals to help with time management and managing stress, I again found myself feeling like I was failing. As I was worrying about how I seemed to be going downhill, two thoughts hit me. First, even if I wasn’t able to circle “significant effort” when asked how I’d done on my goals, I was doing better than before I made these goals. Sure, I might not be perfect with my goals, but any progress was better than where I was before I made the goals. This progress was a success.
The second thing I realized was that in a roundabout way, my failures were actually proving that I was succeeding. Even to me, that sounds a little strange. Let me see if I can explain my thought process. The first two weeks, I set goals that really weren’t too far out of my comfort zone. They didn’t require me to stretch to achieve them. I made little changes, but honestly they barely felt like they were goals. The last two weeks, my goals have required me to make a greater effort. My ultimate goal in attempting this is to become a better, more emotionally resilient person. If I’m setting goals that are easy to achieve, I’m not going to do that. If I’m setting goals that are hard to achieve, that I fail at a bit along the way, I’m actually succeeding at my ultimate, end-of-class goal.
Connections in My Other Reading
About a week before I started this class, I started reading a book called Discovering Happiness Again: Winning the War Against Anxiety & Stress While Building Resilience. I don’t read a lot of self-help books, mostly because they can feel overwhelming and discouraging. It feels like they’re throwing so many changes at you at once, or they suggest things that don’t go along with my spiritual belief system. Fortunately, this book is Christian-based.
So far, it aligns well with LDS teachings. Still, there’s a lot to take in, so it’s taken me a while to make my way through the book. This last week in particular, I’ve found teachings in the book that align perfectly with the Emotional Resilience group discussions as well as with LDS teaching in general. The author uses the phrase “waiting well” when referring to being patient with God’s timing in our lives. This could be replaced with the phrase “enduring to the end.” The book also talks about emotions and how we can choose how much we are going to allow our emotions to control us. Finding this book, which aligns so well with the group discussions has felt like another success.
Final Thoughts
I’ve always been a super competitive person. I want to be the best at everything I do. Even though it’s been more than twenty-five years ago, I can remember toward the end of eighth grade, we took these tests in math and English. They were to determine where we’d be placed in high school.
For some reason, they told us our rankings. Looking back, I feel like they should have just told us what class we’d been placed in. I’m not sure what they hoped to achieve by telling us our exact rankings. I got second in both math and English. Even though a different person ranked higher than me in each, I felt like a failure. I wasn’t the best at math or English.
This desire to be the best and the feeling of failure if I’m not the best has been a struggle for me throughout my whole life. Yes, I know I’m struggling with pride and comparing myself to others. Yes, at times, I feel like it’s only success if someone else fails or doesn’t do as well as me. Yet, I think (or at least hope) that I’m starting to realize that not everything has to be a competition. Eternal success is really about being a little better today than I was yesterday and being able to look back on who I was a year or two ago, realizing I have made progress. It’s a long process, so if I continue to make things into a competition, just know, I’m still a work in progress, as we all are.
