PROGRESS CHECK
by
William Cottringer


Many of us are committed to lifelong learning, growing and improving. At some point we realize something: The process of closing the gap between good to great is what is most difficult and hurts most.

Sometimes we get so involved with our personal development efforts in this last stage that we forget to stop and give ourselves credit for making progress. And other times, we may be making progress and not feel it. Either way, it may be time for a progress check.

There are certain milestones that signal progress in this last, most difficult personal development stage. If you can answer yes to any of these questions, congratulate yourself with a pat on the back, because you are making progress.

1. Are you becoming more aware of your personal faults and shortcomings, especially just after you behave that way? A big part of ridding yourself of a bad habit is to become more aware of it when you are doing it; this is so you can understand those dynamics better and make the best choices to re-arrange some of those dynamics and get different results. Never-the-less, it is the psychological pain of facing your personal limitations that opens the door to getting past them.

2. Are you becoming more open to acknowledging and doing something about your faults? Being driven to learn and improve requires the courage to open the door to feedback—positive and negative. The more practice you get at asking for feedback, the easier it is to set your ego aside and get on with the business of using the feedback to your benefit. Of course checking your ego at the door is the most difficult thing to do.

3. Are you beginning to understand how you are keeping yourself from being as successful as you know you can be? Understanding how you sabotage your own success is enlightening and liberating. A big part of the painful process of going from good to great involves exploring unconscious and even repressed memories of negative injunctions that you bought into, which inhibit your progress.

4. Do other people comment on the positive changes they see? No matter how many internal changes you make in your thinking, there has to be external results that become obvious to others around you. Results are really all that matter. Keep changing your thinking until it gets results and shows.

5. Are the people who are closest to you wrongly and unfairly judging you? This really hurts and usually causes righteous anger, but it is one of those negative signs that you just have to accept and deal with the best you can. In the meantime, it is useful to learn something positive from this hurtful, negative criticism.

6. Are you beginning to notice the relationship between things that work together to create problems and solutions? One of the main benefits of having the courage to go through the door from good to great is the creativity it stimulates. Creativity is often just increasing your sensitivity as to how things are inter-related. Once you start noticing all the ways things are related and inter-connected, the more creative your approaches become to affecting positive changes in these things.

7. Are you becoming more comfortable making positive changes without expecting certain outcomes? One of the most difficult thinking changes to make is to give up having to get preferred results from your actions—especially when you work hard to make that happen, doing the right thing, the right way, for all the right reasons. Oddly, when you give up this natural need, you start getting all sorts of consequences you can easily learn how to prefer and enjoy.

8. Is your motivation gradually shifting from doing things for external benefits to an intrinsic desire to do them because they feel right for you? Intrinsic motivation—the hallmark of success—is doing things because they feel right in and by themselves, not because they give you external rewards. Time always expands and allows you to accomplish more when you are having fun doing something you enjoy.

9. Are you beginning to notice that right behavior is what gets rewarded? Sooner or later, the reality that life is one big behavior modification process aimed at encouraging right, productive behavior and discouraging wrong, unproductive behavior becomes so real that you wonder why it took so long to see. Giving up your rebelliousness to this reality is a major battle.

10. Are you noticing more meaningful coincidences of meeting people who are helpful to you? The more you move from being good to great, the more you see useful clues to make that process easier—especially “chance” meetings with other people who have valuable information to exchange with you. Progress is when you start reaching out to make those meaningful coincidences happen.

11. Do things you read in books, see in art and hear in music seem to speak to you personally? Authors, artists and musicians often travel out to the outer edges of reality and bring back important life-changing information we can all use to grow and improve. The creative format allows us to see the messages directly, without letting them get contaminated in thinking and communicating. Most of the messages confirm your progress.

12. Are you questioning and re-ordering your priorities? When you begin to know what means most to you and start re-arranging your life around those core values, everything else seems to fall in place. The ideas for improvement you have in your mind go to your heart and then to your hands to accomplish. The results confirm your progress.

Stop and assess your own progress in going from good to great. More than likely you will find that you are already dabbling in greatness. Keep up the progress!


William Cottringer is a Success Coach, College Teacher and Writer from Collinsville, IL. He is also author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too. He can be reached at ckurtdoc.charter.net