What does Walking on a Tightrope Have to do with Reaching Your Goals?

In 1991 Vince Poscente along with other Olympic speed skaters were challenged by their coach to walk across a tightrope as fast as they could without falling off. In his book, The Age of Speed, Vince tells of the many times they held their arms out to the side and carefully placed their feet on the rope only to fall off the rope each time.

Have you ever felt that way in how your goals and life are turning out?

After much bruising and humiliation, the coach stepped in and taught them the principle behind success of crossing the rope.

He said, “In order to go fast quit focusing on the rope and start focusing on the destination. Find a clear point of focus at the opposite end of the rope and keep your eyes on that point.”

Each person went to the starting point of the rope, set their sights on the point of focus and took off. Every one of them on the first try succeeded in quickly crossing the rope!

What is your clear point of focus?

Your point of focus means that whatever your goals are they must be centered on values you hold deeply. They also must be driven by theses three key principles in order to sustain the energy, focus, and passion to achieve them:

1. They must be focused on your intrinsic desire of bringing value to others.
2. Your goals must be accompanied with a vision of a material or extrinsic outcome that you hold intrinsically valuable in your heart.
3. Your efforts are magnified by a disciplined structure that you totally embrace and accept. If you resist the structure needed to accomplish your goal, you will fall off of the rope.

If you don’t have these three principles in place you goals will be strangled by the feelings of “ frustration, procrastination, have to’s, should, and must and obligation.

However, when you set your goals based on these three principles something magical happens that brings passion, a deep sense of fulfillment, and speeds up the completion time with greater ease.

If you find yourself off track at any time, you simply go back to the intrinsic reasons within these three steps, which will then re-fire your commitment, passion, and drive, Your Clear Point of Focus.