"Will it work?"

What happens when we detach from outcomes and focus on habits?

Will it work? This is far and away one of the most common questions my clients will ask me. What they really mean is something along the lines of: Will this dream I’m actively chasing, or this challenge outside my comfort zone that I’m taking on, or this decision I’ve made for my business…will it work? It’s a fair question. We all crave certainty when we enter the space of the unknown, particularly when we’ve decided to go after or do something that matters deeply to us.

Usually, I’ll stop the session and wait to check the alignment of the stars so I can accurately predict the exact day it will all work out. (Kidding…If only!) Instead, I tell them the only thing I know for sure, which is that I don’t know. However, when it comes to obsessing about results, one thing I do know a lot about is the power of habits and optimizing for process over outcomes.

I invite you to think back to a moment when you didn’t get the results or outcome you wanted on the timeline you expected. I think most of us know the really easy places to go in those moments: despair, self-doubt, “it’s never going to happen,” “we’re going to fail,” beating yourself up, working yourself to the point of exhaustion. I’m going to venture a guess and predict that none of these strategies worked all that well for you (me neither!). The problem is that if the outcome is the only measure that matters on the path to success, most of us are likely to get discouraged before we ever have a chance of really succeeding.

As a timely example, I looked no further than the story of Wyndham Clark. Clark is a professional golfer on the PGA tour who was viewed as one of the top prospects coming out of college. When success didn’t immediately follow, he spent years on the tour struggling and earned a reputation as an “angry golfer” who was relentlessly hard on himself. During an episode of the golf documentary, Full Swing, Clark says, “I had trained my mind over years of belittling myself and thinking negatively.” It all came to a head when Clark was on the verge of losing his tour card. A heart-to-heart with his caddie and an ultimatum from his team led him to begin working with a sports psychologist for the first time in his career. That same season he earned his first two victories on the tour including a major championship, the US Open. In the closing scenes of the episode Clark reflects, “Pretty much all the way up until this year I’ve always felt and feared the bad things that are going to happen more than believing the good things are, but now I truly have a belief that good things are going to happen.”

How do we do what Clark did? How do we actually make a shift to believing that good things will happen? How do we save ourselves from negative thinking and despair when we haven’t yet achieved the outcome we’re working towards?

While there is never a one-size-fits-all approach to improving our inner game, I want to make a strong case for habits. What I have found is that focusing on what we can control and relentlessly committing to the habits necessary to advance our goals can have a powerful effect on self-belief. James Clear details this phenomenon in his bestselling book, Atomic Habits, writing:

“Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.” (p.38)

This realization has changed my life and my business. When I stopped obsessively focusing on outcomes and started relentlessly prioritizing adherence to the habits I knew were necessary to expand my business, I found that not only did I start seeing the outcomes I wanted (go figure!), but that I became far less stressed and more creative as a result.

I like to think of my habits as the fortress that protects me from the land of despair. These days, self-doubt visits me far less often than the early days of my business, but in the moments that doubt rears its ugly head, and I’m tempted to leave the castle walls, I look at my habits. If there is anything left to finish before the week is up, I get to work. If I’ve honored my commitments, I take a moment to see just how much I’ve done up until this point and take pride in how long I’ve kept it all up for. That practice is enough to keep me from crossing the bridge into the land of despair. Instead, I turn around and walk back to the fortress of self-belief that I built with a fierce dedication to my habits. Like Clark, in that moment, I shift back to believing.

If you’re skeptical, we’re probably kindred spirits. Give me a month - identify the inputs and habits necessary to advance your goals, life, or business that are fully within your control. Break them down into weekly habits and give it a go for 4 weeks. You might just find that you’ve created a foundation for self-belief.