How to keep on going when you feel like giving up

Working towards your dreams and goals isn’t always plain sailing. There are times when you don’t see much progress, when events do not turn out as you expected and when you just think you are mad to keep on trying and even believe that your dreams are possible.

Your inner resistance, or what I like to call the inner gremlin, will rejoice in these moments and happily tell you that there is no way in hell that your dreams will ever happen, that you’ve spent enough time and money on them, that your sacrifice has been too great and that it is now time to throw in the towel. The inner gremlin loves to win its battles in your mind and the battle to give up or keep on going is its whole reason for being!

If you find yourself in this situation, what should you do? Give up or keep going? There are many things to consider and a reasoned appraisal of how your time and resources are being spent may well be necessary. Alongside that, here are some other things you may like to ponder:

• ‘The darker the night, the nearer the dawn.’ This Buddhist expression means that as your journey gets scarier or you arrive at a situation which you think you can’t handle, the closer you are to a breakthrough. Sometimes we give up on a plan just before something wonderful is about to come to fruition and if we had just hung on in there for a bit longer we would have won that particular fight.

• Some things take longer than we had originally planned. When we start taking action towards our goals and dreams we may have a time period in mind in which we want to achieve those goals. Alternatively, we may see people around us achieving similar goals to us and wonder how they can achieve them in a timely manner and we can’t. Imagine that there is a bucket or large bowl in front of you and every time you take action towards your dreams you throw a pebble into the bowl. Gradually the bowl fills up with the pebbles of your effort. When the bowl is full of pebbles, your goals is achieved. It is easy to keep putting pebbles in the bowl , the difficulty is that you don’t know how big the bowl hence you don’t know how many pebbles it will take to fill it. This is where frustration can set in but if you just keep putting in the pebbles of your effort then all the time you are moving towards a full bowl.

• Short term gain versus long term pain. If you are really worn down with making effort towards your goals and just can’t see enough results in exchange for that effort then you might get some short term relief from giving up. But how are you going to feel in the medium or long term? The urge to do your own thing will probably surface again in the future and the pain of burying your dreams this time round could exacerbate feelings of frustration and discomfort in the future.

• Is there another way? What does your dream represent? What does it means to you? Perhaps there is another way of achieving that aim or ‘scratching that itch’. Sometimes we become very entrenched in ‘it has to be like this’ or ‘ this is the only way that I am going to be happy’ and not being able to deviate from this way, or succeed with it, can be very painful. Spend some time brain-storming different ways to achieve the same aim including whether it is possible to combine that aim with your day job or organisation / industry in which you currently work.

It is natural to have doubts and everyone has an inner gremlin that tries to thwart them, even people who appear to be very successful. In order to make the decision whether to give up or keep going you need to ignore what the gremlin is telling you and use your own wisdom as to whether you should carry on regardless, change course or find another way to achieve the same end.