18. The Law of Flexibility

Under the Laws of Success

Success is best achieved when you are clear about the goal but flexible about the process of getting there.

This is one of the most important discoveries made by high-achieving men and women. When you set a clear goal for yourself and make a plan, you usually have a fairly good idea of what it is you will have to do to get whatever it is you want to achieve. However, a thousand things can change, each of which can require changes to your plan. The most optimistic and creative people are those who are open, flexible, and fluid in the face of the inevitable and continual changes they are required to make as they move toward their goals.

The first corollary of the Law of Flexibility is
The continued experience of resistance and frustration is often an indication that you are doing the wrong thing.

Whenever you feel that you are trying too hard and getting too few results, be prepared to stand back and reexamine your plan. Be sure that the goal that you are working toward is still the goal that you desire. Consider the possibility that your chosen strategy may be the wrong one for this situation. Be prepared to reconsider and change your approach. Especially, get your ego out of the way. Be more concerned with what is right than who is right.

Develop the mind-set of a computer programmer. When he designs a computer program, he knows that the program will be full of bugs when it is completed. No computer program ever works perfectly the first time it is run. However, the programmer accepts this as a fact of life and then begins to go back through the program, line by line, to remove the defects. When the programmer is finished, the program will operate perfectly.

By the same token, whenever your plans do not seem to be bearing fruit, instead of pushing harder, stop and reevaluate the situation. Consider the possibility that you could be wrong in your present course of action. Revise your plans continually until they are faultless and they enable you to move forward smoothly, without anxiety or frustration.

The second corollary of this law is
You are only as free in life as the number of welldeveloped options you have available to you.

Your freedom and happiness are largely determined by the number of alternatives that you have developed in case your first choice doesn’t work. The more thoroughly developed your options
and alternatives, the more freedom you have. If one course of action doesn’t develop as you expected, you will be fully prepared to switch to something else.

The very exercise of developing alternatives enables you to think more clearly. The more choices you have, the freer and more flexible you can be. The more choices you have, the more likely it is that one of them will work and enable you to achieve your goal.

The third corollary of the Law of Flexibility is
Crisis is change trying to take place.

Whenever you experience a crisis or roadblock of any kind, stand back for a moment and ask yourself, What change is trying to take place here? What is the message contained in this crisis?

You may be having a crisis in your work, in your personal relationships, with your health, or with your business. In almost every case, a crisis is an indication that something is definitely wrong and that pursuing the same course of action will only make it worse. What is the change that is trying to take place in your life right now?

The fourth corollary of the Law of Flexibility is
Errant assumptions lie at the root of every failure.

Almost every failure you experience will be because of an incorrect assumption that you have made and accepted without question. It is helpful for you to clarify and question your assumptions, especially when things are not going as well as you expected.

What are your assumptions? What are your explicit assumptions, the ones that you are clearly aware of ? What are your implicit assumptions, the unconscious assumptions that you may
be accepting without question?

What if your most cherished assumptions were wrong? What changes would you have to make? How would you change your course of action if something that you were assuming to be true turned out not to be true at all?

Whenever you make the right decisions and you achieve your goals on schedule, it is because the assumptions that you were operating on turned out to be consistent with the reality of the sit-
uation. Whenever you experience failure, setbacks, and resistance, it usually means that there is something wrong with your basic premises, your assumptions.

Many people go broke starting their own businesses because they assume that there is a large enough market for the product or service that they propose to offer. They assume that customers will switch from their current suppliers to them for no other reason than they are in the marketplace. They sometimes assume that they have the talents, skills, and abilities to provide the product or service at a competitive price and still make a profit. None of these assumptions may be correct. If even one is false, it can lead to financial ruin.

Your willingness to question your assumptions, to test your assumptions against reality, combined with the willingness to accept the possibility that you could be wrong, is the kind of attitude that will ultimately lead you to great achievement. Flexibilityis perhaps the most important single quality you can develop to succeed in business in our fast-changing economy. It is the mark of the superior mind.

How you can apply this law immediately:

1. Identify your most cherished assumptions in the most important areas of your business and personal life. What if they were wrong? What would you do differently from what you are doing today? What are your options?

2. List the five worst things that could happen in your personal or business life in the next year. What would you do if one or more of them occurred? Make a list of options for each emergency and begin thinking about alternate courses of action to the most important things you are dealing with today.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).