This tip is about moving into action. You may have heard the adage that insight without action is pretty useless. My first tip is to move into action before you're completely ready because… you'll never be completely ready!
So many of us think that we can reason out the entire plan all the steps how everything will go before we even get started. We expect ourselves to know things that we couldn't possibly know yet.
As a result, we either end up in analysis paralysis and avoid moving forward, or we end up with a plan that is really a plan to fail.
What if instead of planning all the steps, you just planned the first few and then took action and moved forward with a learning mindset? What if we took all the pressure off of those first few steps by thinking of them as just a prototype, a test, a try on, a trial run? I mean how can you fail if you're just trying it out? There's no outcome – there's only learning.
Then as you're taking the action, there's just information to inform how you will move forward. How much easier could it be if you shape your next steps after you've taken the first steps, so you know what you're getting into and you have a better idea of what those steps should be? Wouldn't that be a lot easier than trying to design perfection before you even get started?
Think about a typical workday and how you work best. Do you prefer to start off with small tasks and ramp yourself up to the more challenging ones or do you prefer to tackle that hard task right away and then relax the rest of the day knowing that everything else will be easy for you? If the task that you've chosen seems overwhelming, how can you split it up? How can you motivate yourself? Maybe you can time box it and tell yourself you only have to do it for 15 minutes. Maybe you can give yourself a healthy reward afterwards, like a 20-minute walk outside. Maybe you can use that walk outside to reflect on the process and the experience and what you've learned from it.
A lot of my clients have developed the belief that in order for something to be worthwhile it has to be hard. As a result, they're really hard on themselves.
What if instead you could find ways to make things easier for you? How can making your task easier for yourself translate into a more realistic and more achievable outcome? How will you leverage these concepts to make your actions work for you?
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