Does Persistence Pay Off?

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Valerie Consoli, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

If you asked Taylor Hicks of American Idol fame, he would absolutely say yes, he wrote about the payoff of persistence in his book “Heart Full of Soul“-never saying it was easy but saying that it does pay off.

I am living in the throes of that right now. My husband and I have been trying to sell our house for nine months. We haven’t really overpriced, our house is beautifully kept, move in condition, neither cluttered nor barren, freshly painted with many updates- and yet, here we are after several price reductions, and nine months, still trying to sell. Thus, my thoughts about persistence!

It is not easy, it is absolutely a test for all parts of you, your mind, heart, body, spirit. Each part is tested to the limits, the longer you must persevere, the harder it gets, due to the continuing strain.

This is where faith and trust (and a little bit of pixie dust? Perhaps in my case anyway!) come in. How much faith do you have? How strong is it? How are you with trust issues? Trust has always been a tough one for me. Not by choice, I was taken from my birth mother at a week old and lived in foster homes until nine months old. As anyone who has studied childhood issues can tell you, 0-6 months is a critical time for bonding and trust growth. So, here I am an adult who is not the best at trusting, but who is much better than she used to be, thanks to my own coaches! (Coaches are people too!)

It has been difficult at times to trust that this will all work out in the end. Our hopes have been dashed a number of times and our faith and trust certainly have taken a beating. Have we given up? No. Have we wanted to? You betcha! Will it pay off in the end? Probably! But we won’t know until we get there.

That’s part of what makes journeys like this so difficult, I think, the uncertainty of it all. You really cannot know the outcome until you reach the end of the journey, and since you cannot skip the journey itself (that is where all the lessons and soul growth are!), you just keep going forward. I like to compare it to walking through a long dark tunnel, where all you can see is a tiny pinprick of light far ahead, and you don’t know if that little glimmer of light is the other end of the tunnel, or if it is a speeding locomotive coming your way! You just have to keep going forward in the dark until you reach the light and find out.

So, here’s to those of us traveling through that long dark tunnel, just wondering whats waiting in that tiny glimmer of light, that is all we can see and so we keep moving towards it, hoping it will be the light we have been dreaming of….