How To Keep Moving Forward When You Feel Like Giving Up

Have you ever felt like giving up on your dream? By far, the biggest reason people fail to achieve their goals is that they simply give up.

If you've got a big, ambitious goal like becoming a successful full-time musician, you've probably been tempted to give up on your dream numerous times. The bigger your dream, the bigger the risk of you wanting to give up on it. Why is that?

Well, we often get discouraged at our seeming lack of progress, that we haven't accomplished our goals yet. We look at how far we still have to go to get there and feel overwhelmed. It seems like it will take forever. Or sometimes we doubt that we'll ever get there at all. We feel stuck, like we can't move forward. It seems insurmountable. We feel like we're trying to climb Mount Everest.

The trick to climbing a mountain is looking back at how far you've come. If you're fixated on how far away the peak still is, you're going to feel discouraged, demoralised, and want to give up and turn back. But the more you look over your shoulder at how far you've come, the more accomplished you feel, the more motivated you feel, and the more resources you have to keep climbing. If you look at where you've come from, you can generate a sense of pride and bolster your self-esteem. So sometimes the best way to move forward is to look back.

One of the problems that causes us to feel discouraged about our progress is that we don't celebrate our little wins along the way to our bigger goals. I see two reasons for this. The first is false humility. It's usually not culturally acceptable for us to brag. We've been conditioned to think that's arrogant.

This is particularly prevalent in some cultures. Here in Australia, we have tall poppy syndrome. Whenever someone is perceived as getting too full of themselves, they get cut down to size. No one is allowed to stand taller than anyone else. On the surface, this seems to be promoting modesty and egalitarianism. But the reality is that it's self-deprecating and constricting. It's stealing your aliveness and not allowing you to celebrate yourself. It's a cover for other people feeling uncomfortable with our exuberance and aliveness.

The second reason we don't celebrate our wins is because we compare ourselves to others who are much further along their journey than us. We compare our behind-the-scenes work with other people's highlight reels. Our progress doesn't seem significant to us.

Every step you take, no matter how small, is a step closer to your dream.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. The most important thing is to keep going. Stay the course. Keep gathering momentum. The only way you can truly fail is if you give up.

Remember: a river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence.

Perseverance is the price of success.

We overcome until we become.

Remember when you were a kid and you had drawn a picture or built something out of Lego or climbed a tall tree or learned to play a song? And you'd be really proud of yourself and so excited about your achievement that you'd have to run to your parents and say “Look what I did!”

This is the spirit that we want to embody when we celebrate our little wins. The essence of it is “Yay me! Look what I've done!” There's such a pure, unadulterated sense of pride and joy when you witness this in kids. They're much more connected to their aliveness than we are because they haven't had it programmed out of them yet by social conditioning.

Dr. Nathaniel Branden, the father of the self-esteem movement, had a two-part definition of self-esteem: having confidence in your ability to cope with the challenges that life throws at you, and a feeling of deserving happiness.

Bragging and celebrating your little wins is part of noticing that you deserve to be happy and successful.

Before I go, I want you to celebrate your wins. Write in the comments below a win that you've had in the last week. One win. It doesn't have to be a massive win. It can just be a little win. In fact, the smaller the better because we usually overlook the little wins. It's very easy to miss them when you're fixated on your ultimate goal.

You want to start noticing your little wins and bragging about them, even if it's just to yourself or your partner. This is going to build your self-esteem and help you enjoy the fruits of your growth and development along the journey to your dreams. Every time you notice your little wins, you're topping up your fuel tank to keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other and making progress towards your dreams.