Do you measure the Gain, or the Gap? Which one?

byDadaz123

2K followers

4 years ago

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coaching Inc. came up with the phrase,"Measure the gain, not the Gap". He is a veteran consultant who started out in the mid-1970's and has had more than forty years experience in coaching entrepreneurs.

Living in the Gain

Dan, through his interaction with thousands of entrepreneurs has come across a lot of entrepreneurs who were successful and happy with their achievements. It was reflected in their demeanor and the way they carried themselves

Living in the Gap

He also came across another set of entrepreneurs who had made tremendous progress in the realization of their goals. From all outward appearances, they were successful but they did not seem to be happy

In his communication with this latter group, Dan found out that they were not happy because they were not looking at how far they had come within reaching their goals but instead were looking at how far they were from realizing their idle or future self. In other words, instead of measuring their gain, they were unrealistically measuring their gap and robbing themselves of their happiness.

Instances of Living in the Gap

According to Dan Sullivan, “ Living in the gap occurs when you focus on what’s missing,” instead of appreciating what is present. We live more in the gap than we do in the gain.

You live in a fantastic house by all standards and all you see is what is missing in the house. You are not thinking of the great architecture, the great kitchen, the great bedroom, furniture…………. All you complain about is that the house does not have a great view like the one you used to live in.

You have great kids with good manners. Their grades are up. You got confirmation from their teachers that they are all doing well at school and do not get into fights. They have a problem of not doing their chores except they are reminded. Instead of complimenting them for their good behavior and excellent grades, you spend all the time railing at them for not doing their chores until they are reminded. You are living in the gap and not in the gain.

You have a great lover. She has been faithful to you and loves you adoringly. Both of you have learnt to adjust to your idiosyncrasies and are comfortable in each other’s skin You are grateful for her companionship and would not trade it for anything else in the world. But you suddenly noticed that she has begun to put on weight and that drives you nuts. That’s what you fume about all day.

You came through the portal of Wealthy Affiliate as a Premium member. You were as green as ever a member can be with zero knowledge of Coding, zero Website building skills and little or no background knowledge to fall back on. You started by wetting your feet in the rudiments of website building stripped of its technicalities as only WA can offer. Before you know what is happening, you have built your very first website. It got indexed in Google! You have populated it with blogs you generated yourself and traffic has started trickling in but revenue is yet to come.

And so you are beside yourself with anger because you think your website should have been earning you lots of money. Not so fast. You are living in the gap and have clearly forgotten how far you have come. The amazing progress you have made going from a complete greenhorn to a master online marketer is completely lost on you.

Measuring your Goal: What you need to be wary of

The art of measuring your goal is important in the life of an affiliate marketer because it helps you gauge the amount of progress you have made. It is only by measuring that you know if you have made any progress or not. When we measure the gain and find that we have made progress from where we were to where we now are, it gives us confidence and tells us we are winning especially when we restrict our measurement to our immediate past and present.

The mistake we make in measuring our progress is instead of measuring from our immediate past to the present and see how much progress we have made, we measure from our immediate past to our idle or future self. For instance, the WAer who came in with zero experience in Website building and within a relatively short time has built herself a website, got it indexed and started receiving traffic should be proud of her accomplishment. All she needed to do is measure where she is right now and where she was, not too long ago

But if the same lady decides to measure her progress from where she is right now to her idle or future self, she will be dispirited because it would appear as if she had not even started.

Effects of Living in the Gap

If you constantly live in the gap, you will deny yourself the positive emotions that come from expressing gratitude that will open the door to more relationships. Who wants to be friends with someone who is sour faced and griping all the time about not having met their goals?

When you live in the gap, your physical and psychological health will be negatively impacted just as your sleep and self-esteem.

So in your Wealthy Affiliate business, do you measure your gain or your gap?