Your Results Lag Behind You

The work, whatever the work is for you, is like the mortgage to you buying a house. You don’t really want a mortgage — you want a house.  A beautiful house to call your home. With a yard to garden in, and a living room to watch TV in, and all that other stuff. Or whatever your dumb version of a dream home is.

Whatever it looks like, you’re not really stoked about the mortgage, it just allows you to get the house that you want.

Your results are a lot like that house when it comes to you taking on your own work. Results are the good shit that we want.

The trouble with results is that they’re a lagging indicator for transformation. That means that they’re a pretty bad way of determining how you’re progressing, because they tend to lag behind the work you’re actually doing.

When you’re transforming yourself, you’re shifting the way you BE in the world.

Our belief about how things will work is that we’re going to shift the way we be, and suddenly we’re going to start seeing things go differently. We even try to convince ourselves of this when we’re first setting ourselves up.

“I don’t know what I’m so afraid of! People don’t think I’m too much, I should just start sharing myself more freely.”

That runs you into problems, because in truth, you’ve trained the world around you to relate to you a certain way. When you start showing up differently (when you start to BE differently), it’s running counter to the implied agreement you’ve made with everyone around you.

And when you start to break your implied agreements, people don’t tend to respond too gracefully.

The simplest way to describe this is that, us shifting the way we show up, has an impact. Just like when you’re out canoeing or paddle boarding on a lake, and a speedboat runs by, sloshing you with its wake, it requires some rebalancing and some adjustment. You might even be annoyed at the speedboat, even though they’ve done nothing wrong.

When you start to show up differently, you leave a wake, and people have to adjust to that wake. And because we’re all connected with each other, when people around you adjust themselves, it requires you to adjust to their adjustments.

While all of this is happening, you’re unlikely to see an improvement in your results. In fact, initially, what’s more likely is that you’ll see a drop in the results you’re creating. All of that adjustment tends to create some upheaval at first.

Marketers are selling you the promise of results. But the promise of short-term results is usually paired with a lack of real, lasting change (you’ve noticed how dieting works, right?).

Real transformation will provide you with results — it’s just that they’ll come later. Is your underlying experience of life shifting? That’s the place to keep your attention. Trust that the results will follow.