How are you getting on in lockdown?  Perhaps for the main part you’re doing ok, adapting to the new way of being but then you have a ‘moment’, a wave of overwhelm? It seems a lot of people are feeling this way and yet we are all persevering right now because we have to.

Which set me thinking about the whole subject of perseverance in achieving something that is important to us in the long-term. Learning a language or developing a skill, building a business, and yes, getting through lockdown. 

Thankfully perseverance is not an inherent quality, it is something that can be trained, it can be learned. It’s a combination of mindset and habit. There’s been a lot of research into what thinking and behaviours build perseverance and it’s wonderful that we have more understanding so that we can nurture future generations.  But what about those of us who were ‘made earlier’ before this knowledge was widely available, or perhaps didn’t have positive role models or even worse debilitating childhoods?

The old mantra try, try and try again doesn’t quite cut it.  Not least because if you repeatedly try to do something the same way and it isn’t working then you are not going to succeed, persist as you may.  It will be exhausting, it will be demoralizing, and you will eventually give up; you will tell yourself you really don’t want it after all, or that you haven’t got what it takes, or any other variation as a reason to stop.

So I’d like to suggest that in developing perseverance what’s important is some good solid strategy which includes ‘progressive mastery’. Perseverance is about staying the course on a progressive journey of small accomplishments, improvements, milestones of achievement on the road to your destination. 

So what are the practical steps that can be taken on this journey? What’s the ‘how to’?

First of all it’s important to have a ‘growth mindset’, an inherent belief that your knowledge and skills are not fixed and that you can learn and grow, that you are a ‘work in progress’.  Everything we have ever learned to do was hard in the beginning. 

Brendon Burchard in his book High Performance Habits outlines the following steps as the route to progressive mastery

1. Determine a skill you want to master
2. Set specific goals that will stretch you on your path to developing that skill
3. Have a strong ‘why’ – an emotional attachment to its achievement and the results this is what keeps us going when we have setbacks, this connection is vital
4. Identify the factors that are critical to that success, what do you need to learn to do, what are your strengths that you can build on what are your weaknesses that you need to overcome?
5. Spend time imagining what it will feel like when you achieve this and also what it would feel like if you didn’t 
6. Schedule challenging practices to develop this skill
7. Measure your progress – get feedback from others about how you are doing
8. Practice what you have learned, spend time with others who are also developing this skill, get access and if possible work with people who have already mastered this skill.
9. Continue setting higher-level goals as you progress
10. Teach others what you are learning

Perseverance is never enough on its own, you need a supporting framework, a methodology.  We all have setbacks. Sometimes what we are doing doesn’t work.  We fail.  Those who persevere are not inherently different it’s just that they have broken down what they are trying to master into manageable chunks, are committed for the long haul, and have a clear strategy about what they are doing and why. When they ‘fail’ in an area it doesn’t completely take them out.  They recover.  They put themselves back on the path or identify what elements need to be changed.

We’ve all had times in our lives when we persevered for something that we really wanted. A qualification, a relationship perhaps, or to play a sport at a particular level.  We know at a visceral level what that commitment felt like. It’s that feeling and that promise we made to ourselves that we reconnect with again and again that gives rise to perseverance.  And so as we persevere and navigate our way through these days and weeks, let’s take this opportunity to develop our ‘perseverance’ muscle it will serve us well now and into our futures.