See the Mountain – Mindset Monday

See the mountain once a day; then focus on the trail in front of you.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to overwhelm myself when I get into a big project.  I make two equal, yet differing mistakes.  First, I think too hard about the end result and plotting the perfect course that I often fail to take the first steps needed to make it to the top of the mountain.  Then, once I finally get to work, I plot a timeline/schedule for my perfect course, but it’s a breakneck pace that’s only possible if I can work through the schedule perfectly every day without interruptions.  Brilliant, right?

Many moons ago I suckered my best friend into training for a triathlon with me.  We worked really hard, and we planned a trail run/walk as a fun training day.  We were very smart and packed a fabulous picnic lunch, which we put in a cooler in one of our cars at the top of the mountain trail we were going to tackle.  We drove in the other car down to the trailhead to begin.  We had even studied the trail maps for the park and picked the one that was closest to our distance goal.  Brilliant, right?

The trail was beautiful and shady enough that we didn’t feel like dying in the Alabama heat and humidity, and we were making great time, maybe even running ahead of schedule based on our goal pace.  And then we came to the end of the marked trail we had planned to follow.  There was no parking lot with our parked lunch cooler car.  Instead, there was more mountain to hike and a sign pointing to another trail that would take us to the lunch cooler car.  And we had no idea how long the new trail would be because we thought we had already accounted for that distance.  Brilliant, right?

We were somewhere between trailheads with no plan because our perfect lunch plan had just been obliterated by this sign and the new colored trail marks it told us to follow.  We had to decide if it was better to keep going up, or turn around and go back to where we started.  We took a look up the mountain, and we decided to go for it.  If we had focused on the fact that the map was weirdly drawn and had delayed our lunch by at least another two miles uphill, that mountain would have taken forever to hike because our attitude would have made things miserable.  We focused on the trail markers and where we were headed, and those extra miles weren’t so bad.

Long story, short: It’s easy to get discouraged when you see how much mountain you still have to climb to get to the top, no matter how brilliant your plan was to begin with.  By concentrating on the next step that’s directly in front of you, you’ll be able to feel less pressure from the enormity of the overall goal and focus on the task at hand.  You still need to see the big picture, but it doesn’t need to hang over you like an oppressive shadow.  Let it be motivation to keep moving and a reminder of why you’re taking this particular trail.  Don’t let it scare you into never leaving the parking lot.

Additional moral to the story: sometimes you have to change plans mid-trail, or maybe you have to find the next trail when the one you just finished didn’t get you all the way to the endpoint you wanted.  That’s not failure.  That’s being resilient and adapting to the situation on the ground.  That’s a solid marker of mental health, and it’s a good thing.

What mountain are you planning to climb?  What does the trail look like that puts you on a path to accomplishing that goal?  How can you narrow your focus to just that trail in front of you?