Do you ever stop and think to yourself – ‘I thought I’d be further along on my property journey by now’. ? 😔
You’re not all alone. We all do. The cause of our pain as a striver, as an ambitious property entrepreneur, is a feeling of never being satisfied. We can easily fall into the self-talk of ‘I’ll be happy when….I have this, reach that, accomplish this….’ And that’s not serving you.
Darren Hardy calls this the Staircase Paradox – where no matter how hard you climb, all you see is where you aren’t, and what you aren’t.
So the antidote to this is to understand the proverbial ‘staircase’ in order to reframe your perspective and see things through a healthy, and HAPPY lens. That’s exactly what I wanted to share in this post.
Here are the two things to understand about the ‘staircase’:
THING #1: The staircase is infinite, there is no final destination to reach. The higher we climb on it, the more the staircase extends.
The key thing to understand is that the point is not to arrive, ie it’s not about the “I’ll be happy when”, because our brains don’t work like that. The only point is to climb and to enjoy the journey.
So how do I enjoy the journey? – you may be asking. Well, psychologists have proven that what makes us happy is visual evidence of progress. Sounds simple but what’s easy to do is also easy not to do. That’s why I love the weekly power hour calls and monthly masterminds I do- I love helping people reflect on the week or month that was and recognise their incremental progress.
As a property entrepreneur it can be so easy to get caught up staring at the top of the ‘staircase’ thinking ‘I’m not there yet, I don’t have x no. of properties/monthly cash flow/portfolio value etc. And if we’re focusing on where we aren’t, we’re discounting all the little steps we took during the week, like the calls we made, the viewings we did, the spreadsheet we built etc.
I know many reading this will know this stuff, but sometimes we need to be reminded of it by having it packaged up in a different way. I really like this staircase paradox because for me has reinforced a lesson I learned from Dan Sullivan years ago who said the same thing, just slightly differently – he talked about measuring the gain (ie the ground covered) vs the gap (ie from where you are to where you aren’t yet but want to be).
THING #2: You can’t assess or measure your success by comparison to others because:
- You don’t know where their ‘staircase’ started. I’d also add to this that you don’t know where they might be pointing their staircase – ie some people want to list a company on the stock market, and others want to create a property business that delivers a six figure income with minimal stress.
- You don’t know if others have been given or have found an ‘escalator’. 😊
So, as we reflect on the week that was and think about the one ahead, have this staircase paradox front of mind.
What step did you climb this week to create visual evidence of progress in your property business…that you can now acknowledge and therefore feel happy about?