Trip hazards and how to avoid them

Hello and welcome to week nine of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life.

Someone once wrote, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” This contains two helpful notions — 1) that change is hard and 2) we need to watch out for trip hazards along the way! In Swim Jump Fly I mention 14 such hazards. I’ll cover seven this week:

1. Own Goal

If you don’t know your football (Soccer) from your football (American), then you may not know about own goals. It’s when a player accidentally kicks the ball into their own net. An own goal in a change project is the same; you’ll create one if you don’t set the right objectives. If you find your project isn’t going well maybe your goal was off. Perhaps you’ve had nagging feelings that the focus wasn’t right? If you’ve been ignoring these doubts, then maybe it’s time to review what you really want to achieve.

2. Running away vs. running towards

From a distance it’s hard to know why someone is running. Are they fleeing from or racing to? To the casual observer they look the same. It can be equally baffling to the runner. Some of the interviewees for my book were running to. But many were running from. It takes distance and time to figure…