The power of deficit thinking

(Sent from a friend)

The next time someone urges you to focus on the gap between where you are and where you hope to be, ignore them. You know the gap is there. It’s far better to focus on whatever success you’ve had in bridging that gap. That builds self-confidence and encourages you to take the risks needed to improve further. Focusing on what’s missing will encourage you to play safe to avoid still worse happening.

Deficit thinking is an ingrained habit of focusing on gaps and weaknesses. It’s focusing on what you can’t do, not what you can. Instead of your dreams and ambitions propelling you forward, you let the gap between your current state and your desires become a continual source of frustration and depression.

You would imagine this type of thinking would generally be discouraged, but you’d be wrong. It’s everywhere, because people suffer from the mistaken belief that paying attention all the time to the gaps between what you have and what you think you want will be motivating. It will propel you forward to fill the gap.

That may be true for some people, but for most the effect is the opposite. Faced with continually falling short of what’s supposed to be attainable, they give up — and then feel even worse for having done so.

Besides, many of the other ‘gaps’ are there because, deep down, what they represent isn’t you. You don’t want to be different or ‘better’ in that precise way; it’s other people who tell you that you ought to do it. They want you to change to suit their agendas, and you go along — at least on the surface — because it’s polite, or socially desirable, or you wish that you could agree with them (only you don’t). This gives you almost zero real motivation to change. As a result, you talk a great talk about whatever it is, yet never quite seem to be able to turn the talk into effective action. If you truly wanted to change — or give up whatever it is — you would find a way to do it, believe me.