Have you ever had someone tell you to keep your eyes on the prize? Perhaps you were slacking off or being lazy. Maybe you were straying from the path and they were trying to bring you back on course. Or it could be they thought you are making a big mistake, putting yourself in harm’s way, or doing something you’d regret. This phrase can mean the difference between success and failure…but not how you might think.
Keep your eyes on the prize, or some variation of that message, is thrown around in athletics, business, and relationship settings. Maybe the wording is different, it could be something like, stay focused on the goal or remember what we’re working for, but the message remains the same – Keep your eyes on the prize!
This is total nonsense for several reasons.
Imagine you are climbing a mountain. It’s a Colorado fourteener and the goal is to reach the summit, document it with a mountaintop selfie, and ceremoniously check “Climb a mountain” off your bucket list. As you begin from your base camp with your guide, he is going over safety tips, the weather report, and the projected route to the top. The first few hours is a breeze, zig-zagging through tree lined paths, waving at mountain bikers, and the excitement of the journey is energizing.
Then, a few hours into the climb, the path disappears and you find yourself navigating uneven, rocky terrain, you are beginning to feel the burn in your legs, and the adrenaline from the start of the journey is fading. At this point, your guide stops, realizing your struggles navigating the loose, jagged rocks and large downed trees. He turns around from a few steps ahead of you and offers a piece of coaching advice for traversing the grueling landscape. He tells you the best way to tackle the obstacles is to keep your eyes up and stay focused on the mountaintop.
You take his advice and begin climbing with your head up, never losing sight of the peak. This gives you a renewed excitement and motivation to keep moving, I mean, you're climbing a mountain! The problem is, your progress slows dramatically. Once again, the guide looks over his shoulder as he climbs, takes his index and middle fingers, points at his eyes, then turns and points them at the top of the mountain, as if to say “Keep your eyes on the prize.”
You refocus your attention on the summit and press on, but quickly stumble, spraining your ankle on a loose boulder. You continue on, at the encouragement of your guide, hobbling along with your eyes fixed on the peak. Before long, even at a painfully slow pace, you don’t notice a large tree root protruding from the ground and you trip, falling on both knees, leaving them bruised and bloody.
But you’re no quitter. You refocus on the top of that mountain and press on with your sprained ankle and throbbing, blood stained knees.
A few steps later, you don’t realize there is an icy patch of snow right in front of you. Your feet come out from underneath you and you fall backwards, taking a few barrel rolls down the mountain before coming to a stop.
I’ll pause your mountain climbing story right here. The adventure is not going very well and you are having a pretty tough go. You want to climb a mountain, you're fully capable of climbing a mountain, but you're failing painfully. Your guide repeatedly cues you to “Keep your eyes on the prize.” This offers a jolt of momentary motivation, but quickly gets you in trouble as you continuously trip over obstacles that may have been avoided if you were watching where you were going, one step at a time. You could have avoided a lot of pain with some basic instruction on how to overcome the terrain. If you would have just kept your head down and kept working, you could have made more progress and avoided the setbacks.
Now do not misunderstand, knowing where you are trying to go, what you are working towards, your goal or prize, is paramount when setting out to accomplish anything from climbing a mountain, to losing weight, to starting a business. Likewise, “the prize” can be a great motivator and having daily reminders of where you want to go is a good thing. However, fixating on your goal can actually hinder your progress towards it.
This phrase is thrown around universally with positive intentions. It is not something that people think twice about before saying because it is generally accepted as an encouraging and good phrase. But, all too often we impose our own values, beliefs, and goals on to others. You need to make sure you are clear on your dream, have defined your goals to get there, and have a process in place to achieve those goals, then just keep moving.
Goals, when done correctly, provide milestones along the way to your dreams. To illustrate this, I'm going to borrow your character from our mountain climbing adventure and transport you over the the west coast, just outside of L.A. Imagine your dream is to be on the shores of Hawai’i but you are currently in smoggy California. Every goal you have should be a buoy in the ocean between L.A. and Hawai’i. These buoys are checkpoints on your way to your dreams and reaching these goals should be cause for celebration and provide a moment of rest along the way.
In order to reach each goal buoy, it takes work like you wouldn’t believe. Swimming in the open ocean, trying to stick to your process and be efficient with your strokes. Sometimes the current is with you and the progress seems easy, sometimes it is against you with waves crashing and you are just trying not to drown. Your process, your work, happens between the buoys.
99.9% of the journey from L.A. to Hawai’i, where you are to where you dream you’d be, is spent in the water, in the work, fighting for every inch.
No one accomplishes anything with their head in clouds all day, dreaming about what could be. Dreams are achieved through relentless focus on the task at hand. You had better learn to love the process, the time in the water, the fight, the work, because that is where you are going to spend most of your time. Motivation and excitement around your dream will wane, so you need to find a way to love the work and the process of getting better every day. Find excitement in the little victories and small improvements. Celebrate your consistency and discipline to show up. Get pumped up when you reach a goal, no matter how small it may seem.
Dreams have a place in the back of your mind, constantly simmering as you focus on the work of the day. If you have defined your values, gotten clear on your dreams, and stated your goals, you can then get to work on the process of reaching each of those goals. Often times this requires help from a coach, mentor, or trainer, someone that has either been to where you are going themselves or has guided people there before. If you have never been to Hawai’i, do you know the best way to get there? If you've never climbed a mountain, how do you know the route?
Be humble enough to share your dreams with someone you trust. Find the resources you need to build out a process you can commit to. If you fully trust your process, you no longer need to “keep your eyes on the prize” but rather you can dive in and focus all of your attention on the actionable steps necessary to reach your goals that lead to your dreams.
Get clear on your dreams – big, exciting, meaningful dreams. Define your goals – manageable measurable, concrete goals. Create your process – a thoughtful, collaborative, trustworthy process. Then, simply lock in on the next step and get a little better every day.
Wherever you’re headed, whatever your goals, let me be the first to tell you, don’t worry about the prize, fall in love with the process.
Comments