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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