The Beauty of Obstacles
For some time, productivity experts and motivational speakers have stated that obstacles are a good thing. They show that we are going in the right direction towards what we are trying to achieve and that the more obstacles we encounter, the greater the reward.
The question is how do we deal with them and how do they help us.
An effective way to deal with obstacles is threefold: go over, around or through.
Going over would be working harder to overcome whatever is in our way. An example would be that we are not selling as much as we need to make our company successful. The obstacle there is a lack of sales, the way to get over it is to get in front of more qualified prospects with a quality offering. There are 2 very important parts to the equation: qualified people to sell to AND a quality offering.
This is where the beauty of obstacles really shines. Most people will become discouraged and stop when their product doesn’t sell or they will do more of the same things that are not working.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -Anonymous.
Getting your message to more people may seem like the correct thing to do, but if they are not the right fit or your product is not great, you will get the same poor results. This seems like common sense, but in reality, most people will continue to use the same tactics over and over until they get frustrated and quit. Then they will say that selling does not work, or that having a website or social media presence is no help.
The largest brands in the world would beg to differ. They continually adjust their approach and go over obstacles to reach more consumers of their offerings. They know that finding the right consumer for the right product is an important consideration and they work on both sides of the equation.
The good news is that we can now use online tools to test what products and services appeal to what people. We can even use this approach to determine the name of the product. Companies regularly use online polling or social media advertising to determine what products appeal to people and even what to call them.
Once we find a way over an obstacle, we are in rare company because at that point most people and companies have given up, so there is much less competition and opportunities for success are higher.
Going around an obstacle would work when the obstacle is either too big to go over or through or going around it is a better use of resources. An example would be setting up a website rather than opening up a physical store because of all of the requirements for a store, like renting a space, employing people to work in the store, carrying inventory, insurance, etc. By contrast, a website would be the store with no rent, no employees, inventory shipped directly from the supplier to the client and no insurance.
In this case going around the obstacle makes more business sense rather than expend resources opening a physical store.
Going through an obstacle is when the obstacle can be beaten, very often by hard work and time. The four-minute mile is an example. For many years running a mile in four minutes was considered impossible until Roger Bannister did it in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds in 1954. Roger Bannister worked extremely hard to beat the milestone and finally did it at age 25.
Achievers know that obstacles are a good thing and that they show that you are making progress towards your goals. If there were no obstacles, everyone would accomplish what they wanted and success would be more widespread and less special.
Successful people also do not change directions of give up when they hit an obstacle, they use one of the three techniques above to deal with it. They continue towards their goal, but change their tactics, much like an airplane flying to a city. It there is bad weather, a plane goes around it, but it still goes to its destination, unless there is a very serious reason it cannot land there. The pilot does not decide that the conditions are difficult so they will fly to another city. If they did that, the airline would be out of business very quickly, as their main job is to transport passengers safely to the place they paid to go to.
This may seem like common sense, but personally it is very often not common practice. People come up against an obstacle and instead of dealing with it, they give up or change their destination, frequently without even verifying if the obstacle is actually real or just a minor issue.
Is it Really an Obstacle?
Sometimes the obstacle is not even a real one, just like a warning light in your car. Very often our vehicles will warn us that something is wrong, and it can be very concerning to see that light telling us to “check engine.” The first step is to verify if this is truly an obstacle. In the case of your car, a warning light is not the steering wheel or the brakes; in other words, it is not a vital part that you cannot do without in the operation of the car. Many vehicles will give you a “check engine” warning if you do not put the gas cap on properly! Certainly not a major obstacle, once you know to check for it, and nothing to do with the engine at all.
In the case of low sales in a company, an executive might think that there was something wrong with the sales team, when the issue might actually be that they are calling people during the day when they are at work and do not answer. The clients call back after 6pm when the sales office is closed, and no contact is made. This is a minor “warning light” telling the company that if they make an adjustment to their calling schedule to when their clients are available, they will have more success speaking to them and converting those conversations to sales.
After making the adjustment, like tightening the gas cap or adjusting your calling schedule, if the situation continues, they you know you probably have another obstacle, but until you determine that, checking minor things first that can be easily fixed is a good approach.
The other caveat with obstacles is to try not to hold onto them for the rest of your life. How many times have you spoken to someone that refuses to buy a particular brand because of something that happened to them years or even decades in the past? They will tell you they will not deal with a company or buy a product because they had so much trouble or were treated poorly once.
Or they will tell you that they heard from a parent, relative, friend that something was not good, and they have accepted it as truth. This happens very often in the finance and money world. People will tell you that they lost money in the stock market or in real estate or that someone they know did, and they refuse to even talk about it, even though research shows that these can be excellent ways to increase your wealth and millions of people have done it.
This type of thinking can be very risky because it can extend to all areas of our lives. Striving to learn from things that have happened to us, grow from them and get past them will help us move on with our lives.
This is not to ridicule or downplay serious issues that have happened in the past. If someone has had a very serious personal situation, it is prudent to be wary of things that could place them in that situation again, but to completely avoid it and not use common sense can inhibit growth and achievement.
When you look at obstacles as something positive to be dealt with, grown from and overcome, you will seek them out rather than avoid them because growth and prosperity are on the other side of them.