You have been working on a project for months. Going through the steps needed to get it all set up. You feel productive from all the work you love to do.
So it’s opening day, you open up the doors to your work and… crickets
Why are you not getting anybody showing up?
I have faced this a few times in my journey that is The Relaxed Male. What is the common denominator of all of my successes and failures? The answer is action. More specifically whether or not I took the needed action.
Unfortunately, the phrase build it and they will come is only concerning dead baseball players in cornfields. In real life, your customers or audience isn’t going to just show up. You have to take all the actions needed.
These action items aren’t always going to be the fun things. Most of the items are going to be things and activities you don’t like. Yet to achieve your goal you have to go through that discomfort of growth to get better at what you don’t know how to do very well. That is a good thing. Yet when you hear people like me or Ryan Michler talk about taking action this is the action that needs to be done.
Why is action important?
You have a certain objective that you want to achieve right? To get to that objective there are steps you have to make. You can plan all day long. You can plot and scheme and find every way possible to not take the needed actions you need to take.
However, eventually, if you want to succeed in whatever you’re doing you have to do all the steps. That means learning how to sell your wares or your service. You have to understand all the intricate aspects of selling, of lead generation, of the boring things like paperwork. Keeping track of your income.
All of these and more are important for whatever project you have in mind. There are always going to be things you do not like to do. There are things that you’re gonna love to do and you wanna do just those things.
However, you’re not gonna be able to just do all those things that you like to do as I heard one guy who perpetually failed and he couldn’t figure out why. Yet he also claimed that he shouldn’t have to do the “bitch work“. Yet if you want to be successful, you have to do that work. You wear all the hats at the beginning.
Without action, you’ve got nothing. The overnight success people have been producing action for 10 years, before all of a sudden everybody notices them. you have to put in value that is taking action for you to be able to earn money. Taking action is the most important thing to do on any of your goals that are going to be coming up in this next year.
Whatever goals you’ve planned, you’ve gotta take all the actions. Even when you don’t feel like taking that action, you have to take that action. This makes you stronger makes you better because you’re willing to suck it up and do what needs to be done.
What keeps you from action?
OK, so you now know what taking action possibly means. But what keeps you from taking the action? Why is it so hard to take action on the things you know need to be done?
There are many reasons why, but there are five that show up time and time again some can actually be tied together, while others might just show up in a very minuscule way that you’re almost not even noticing.
So what time to what is keeping you from taking action?
Your Thoughts
Much like the guy who wanted to have his own business, but didn’t want to do all the work. Your thoughts are the number one reason why you don’t get stuff done. These are called excuses.
Common excuses that you will hear from yourself and others are…
- I don’t have time
- I don’t feel like it
- I don’t have the money
- Someone else already thought of it
- I will do it later
- I will get to it someday
All six of these examples are just thoughts. Now let me show you.
I don’t have the time
You have the same amount of time in your day as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, as the guy in your town who is known for being well-off. How are they able to get so much done in the same amount of time that you have?
It’s time management. They don’t sit around and watch hours upon hours of television. They don’t sit around and play hours and hours of video games. They get up they have a routine they go to work they keep working and they will work until they finish whatever their tasks are. Sometimes yes they have their time set so that they have free time in their
There are 168 hours within one week. Now if you’re working full-time you take 40 hours away let’s say you’re not doing any overtime. That leaves you with 128 hours of free time.
Now let’s Take away 56 hours of sleep. That is if you get eight hours of sleep in one week. So that leaves you with. 72 hours of free time. That is three full days of work that you could do now you also need to take out your Dr. time you’re eating time things along those lines, but you can get a business up and going if you commit 15 hours a week to your dream. Yes, that is it. 15 hours a week. You’ll find out though eventually you get a lot more done if you take up even more of that time. So telling yourself that you don’t have time is nothing more than an excuse.
Your Why
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Most people will say because if I don’t, I’ll get fired from my job. All right why do you go to your job? Because if I don’t, I will get kicked out of my house or I have to pay my bills. I have to eat. You have your why you get out of bed. That why works good because you do get out of bed every day. It’s required of you.
To change a habit you also need a Y to start a business. Most people start with wide likes to make more money. I hate to tell you that’s not a very strong why. That’s a very weak, Why at best. that is because you have to change how comfortable you are with money.
If you make more money than you’re comfortable with, you will blow it you will get a lot get rid of it in some form fashion, or another. This is called your upper limit problem or upper limit challenge talked about by Gay Hendricks.
Your why is going to motivate you when you least want to do the actions that need to be done.
Your Motivational Triad
Our motivational triad wants us to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and do it as efficiently as possible. Learning something new is not efficient, it is also fairly painful. On top of that, it’s not very pleasant while you’re learning. So doing the stuff that you don’t like to do is instantly screwing up your motivational triad.
Now you’re why you can short circuit your motivational triad also. It actually causes you to not be motivated by pain, pleasure, and efficiency. This is why you need to have a very strong and powerful. Why if not, you’re likely to fall back into the old habits rather quickly.
This is why losing weight is such a challenge because you have to know why you’re losing weight. This is why people with lung cancer can suddenly drop cigarettes like they have no addictive properties whatsoever ( sidenote: they aren’t addictive).
Taking the wrong action
This is one I’m always doing. Taking the wrong actions. This feels like you’re being productive, and in two appointments you are being productive. But it’s not the right type of productive.
Case in point, I write on average three blog posts a week. One of those blog posts is a podcast. Is that moving my company forward? Sort of but not fast. To move my company forward. I need to be doing the challenging stuff that I am not good at. That includes selling and generating leads. I don’t do that very often, so my growth is happening it’s just not hockey stick happening
If you’re willing to sit down and be honest with yourself, you can find out where you’re making the wrong actions. But you have to be honest with yourself. This is because if you’re not, you are very easily able to lie to yourself, saying I’m doing everything when in reality you’re doing very little.
How to change the action
So once you realize that the reason your company organization goal is not taking off, or not going in the direction you wanted to because of your lack of, what do you do?
There are a few things you can do that will get you moving in the right direction. This works whether you are just starting on your path, or you’ve been on your path for a while and you’re just realizing that you have not been taking the right type of actions.
Visualize
What do you want to accomplish? What does it look like when you accomplish that goal? How many years will it take for you to get to that goal? What will it feel like when you achieve that goal these are all important questions that you need to ask when visualizing your goal.
How are you going to act when you achieve that goal get detailed in your description when you are visualizing the results that you want to have as detailed as possible. What does that goal look like? What does that goal smell like? What does that goal taste like? Everything about your objective needs to be looked at. Look at what the objective is because that’s what’s gonna help you in the next step.
Plan in detail
Start making plans for everything that you need to do to achieve your goal. It’s OK if you forget a step or two. That is because life will teach you what the next step is. But you need to have an idea of what you believe the next step is going to be, or you’re going to have a lot of confusion in your mind.
What’s the first step you wanna take? Write that down. then you write down the next step. Then you write down the next step. And you keep writing those steps down until you have what you believe is the final step of achieving your goal. This is a roadmap to reaching your objective.
Now roadmaps don’t tell you where all the potholes are. Neither does your goal-oriented roadmap. So yeah you’re going to realize that oh before you can get the step five you probably need to get step seven taken care of then do step five or I didn’t realize I needed to do all these other little steps before I get there even get the step 10 and so you have to amend your roadmap. And that is good because that means you’re learning you growing you’re becoming better.
Change the thoughts that you were having about learning. Getting better at achieving a goal is all about learning a lesson that you need to know so that you reach the goal you want.
Fully understand why
Once you have your plan laid out and you have all the steps set. Look at the way on each of those steps. Do you want to understand the reasons behind the why, so you can fight any mental resistance you may have?
Then execute the Plan
finally, you were at the most important step. It’s time to execute and when it’s time to execute, you do the plan. Your mind will want to come up with the I don’t want to. I’m not feeling it. I am not inspired by all these other types of excuses. But you’re going to need to just patch your little mind on the head and say that’s cute but we’re doing it anyhow and figure it out figure it learn how to power through the I don’t wanna
