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Escape Routes



It’s a well-documented fact that human beings respond to negativity far more strongly than positivity. Although there are many destructive consequences that come from that portion of our psychological wiring, I have been thinking more lately about a very specific effect: escape route fixation.

All too often, when embarking on a journey towards a new goal or making a plan for something positive in the future, we begin with creating escape routes – the contingencies for when things go wrong and when failure hits. We start coming up with reasons the plan may fail. Don’t get me wrong, I think we need to be prepared for things to be more difficult than planned and unanticipated curveballs to come our way, but when the majority of our effort goes to planning around what might go wrong, we have less energy and resources to actually plan for what happens if things go right. We become so preoccupied with failure that we forget to prepare for success.

While we need to have a mindset that’s gritty enough to absorb setbacks and failure, we can’t afford to spend so much attention on tunneling out of disaster before crafting a path towards success. If all you can see is why your plan won’t work, you will likely miss the avenues leading you around that defeat towards victory. There are a million ways to lose. Focus on what winning looks like.

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