How to finish what you started
December 2024
In order to advance your career, the minimum thing you need to do is to follow through. Doing what you have promised and finishing what you’ve started builds trust, and trust is the pillar that sustains your working relationships.
Following through isn’t a simple task, though. How many new year resolutions have you abandoned? How many times have you left for later writing that boring report?
It’s a common problem. The majority of people procrastinate, sabotaging themselves from finishing what they started. To solve this, you need to change your way of thinking.
This article explores different strategies on how to make this happen.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
Losing trust
In a professional environment, commitments matter. When you say to someone that you are going to do something, and then you don’t do it, that person’s view of yourself changes for the worse. They see you as unreliable, even incompetent, and your relationship suffers. If you keep letting that person down, they’ll eventually avoid dealing with you entirely, which can result in missing key opportunities to progress your career.
It’s bad when the person you let down is someone else, but it’s even worse when you let down your own self. Lying to yourself can cause feelings of shame, regret, and guilt. Overtime, you lose confidence, and you think negatively about you. This can also cause you to stop following through on new personal commitments, causing even more damage to your ego. It’s a vicious cycle.
So how can you break or avoid that vicious cycle? Some strategies that can help include focusing on the performance, not the results, changing one step at a time, and reflecting on the progress you’ve made so far.
Focus on the performance, not the results
Results are a thing of the past. Once you get a result, there is no way to change it. It’s there forever, no matter what you do next. If it’s a good result, you might feel happy, even brag a bit. If it’s a bad result, you feel bad and probably angry. The key thing here is that the result is meaningless after the fact. It’s better to focus on the performance that delivered the result. There is no way to change a result, but the performance is a different story. Analysing the performance is how you learn and get better.
Why am I not following through on this? What can I do to help me finish? What changed this time that I managed to finish what I wanted to finish? Asking yourself those type of questions is what’s going to help you improve.
This also has a side effect. You are going to enjoy the journey more. You’ll find less reasons to stop doing what you’re doing because you are going to be constantly learning new things about you.
Change one step at a time
Once you identify what to change, the next step is how to change it. Usually, big transformations don’t work. Many examples, like big rewrites of old systems, return to office mandates, or adopting methodologies just to follow a trend, show that it is, most often, a bad idea.
In order for a change to stick, you have to treat it more like creating a new habit, or abandoning an old one. The following steps can help you with this:
- Start by identifying a small action related to your big change. It has to be something that you can do now. Not today, now.
- Every day, force yourself to do that same action that you just defined.
- Do it everyday until it becomes natural.
- Once that small action is natural to you, set up a new one that gets you closer to your big change. It has to be something that you can do now. Not today, now.
- Go back to step 2
It’s the boiling frog story. The idea is that, by introducing changes gradually, you remove the friction and increase your probability of success.
With this strategy, if you spend the time and if you are consistent, you will achieve your goal.
Reflect on your progress
Gradual change can be slow, though, and it might be difficult to keep the motivation. In order to not get demoralised, another strategy you need to be using is reflecting on your progress often.
Now, be careful. You might be tempted to compare your progress with your end goal. This is a mistake. That type of comparison can have the same demoralising effect. The goal might be too far away yet. The thing is, you don’t have any control over that. Worrying about how much work you still have to do is pointless, and it leads to procrastination. With all the amount of work I still have to do, I better scroll mindlessly on social media.
To avoid that trap, you have to look back, not forward. It’s important to compare your progress with your starting point. That way, you get a sense of how much you have improved, which fuels your motivation to keep improving, and reinforces your new habits.
Summary
You need to stop thinking about the end goal, and start thinking about your performance. It’s not about finishing, it’s about relying on your system to get you there. It’s about creating the habits that help you to avoid procrastination as much as possible. It’s about continuous reflection. It’s about enjoying the journey.
In the end, it’s about growth.
That’s all!