“Progress only starts when you get clear on where you are right now.” Michael Hyatt
In order to move on , we need to know where we are moving from. This is true for all things:
If you want to know how to find the the store in the mall, you need to find the “you are here” point on the map.
If you want to lose weight, and gain muscle, you need to identify the current state of your health.
If you want to get out debt, you need to understand how much you are in the red.
This is a simple truth. Not science, not theory. Truth. We need to know where we are and where we want to go, so we can gain clarity on where we are heading.
This sounds simple enough, except for one thing: sometimes it’s too painful to be honest with where we are at. So instead of honesty, we avoid looking at the present, or we avoid looking at the future because we don’t want to know how far we are from our desired state.
I have a friend who keeps expressing discontentment about his present circumstances. When I ask him where he wants to be, he tells me he doesn’t know. Vagueness surrounds him.
After repeated conversations, my friend realized he wasn’t honest with himself because he was ashamed of where he was in life. Any time he identified a goal, he fell into self condemnation, berating himself that he wasn’t further ahead. Instead of allowing honesty to give him clarity, he allowed honesty to cripple him.
It’s hard to establish where we are, because we don’t want to be confronted with the gap that lies between where we want to be. If we are honest with ourselves and determine the distance between our current and desired place, we use the discrepancy as a stick to beat ourselves with, instead of a yardstick to measure with.
There are things I want to change in my life. Areas where I am not where I want to be. I know there are things I need to do to get there. But how can I get “there” if I’m not honest with where my starting point is? How can I get there, if I’m too scared to identify where “here”” is?
Progress only starts when you get clear on where you are right now. No matter how painful that clarity is.