THUNDER BAY – BUSINESS – We all have things that we want to achieve in life and often, at the start of a year, we become enthused with the idea of starting afresh and making changes in our lives to achieve our goals. All too often, though, we can reach the end of a year feeling that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to.
It’s a common problem. Often the easiest path in life is to accept the status quo and not upset the equilibrium. However, what that doesn’t do is lead you closer to what you want in life. Whatever you’re looking to achieve, whether it’s a change in your relationship, your fitness, your financial situation or your career, there’s one universal starting step to getting what you want in 2016 – and that’s to take action.
Here’s why taking action is so important in achieving any goal that you might have.
Only you can make it happen
It’s no good sitting and hoping that someone will come along and present you with a great new work opportunity, or suddenly inflate your bank balance. The first thing you have to realise is that your destiny is your own, and you need to take responsibility for it. Otherwise your dreams will remain as such, and never become reality. Don’t look to blame anyone else for the fact that you aren’t achieving your life ambitions – other people can advise you and give their opinions, but the momentum for change has to come from within.
Taking action leads to fine-tuning our desires
We can’t magically get what we want by wishing for it. We have to take steps to achieve our goals. You may have spent hours researching different career ideas, but until you take action, you won’t know if this is the right course for you to take. When you experience something, you get a much better perspective on whether a potential career change is right for you. For example, you may be an office worker who feels like they’d make a good teacher. Have you ever been in a classroom since you left school? If the answer’s no, then you need to get some classroom experience. Being in a classroom for a day will allow you to see what teaching is really like. And by the end of just one day, you’ll be much better placed to know if that’s the right choice for you or not.
Sometimes when you do things you realise that it’s not as easy to get where you want as it seemed in theory, and it may be that you realise that a particular choice is not the right one for you, but by taking action, you’ll be moving forward. If plan A seems to be a non-starter, what’s plan B?
Knowledge isn't power; it's potential power. Execution trumps knowledge any day of the week.
— Tony Robbins (@TonyRobbins) February 3, 2016
Action boosts your self-esteem
Sometimes it’s difficult to know what the right thing to do in life is and often we are led by what other people think. You need to decide what things are right for you to aim for and work towards. You’ll recognise them because you’ll have a gut feeling about them.
Take exercise as an example. You may want to get fit this year, but may also not want to actually begin a programme of exercise – booking a gym induction, going for that first swim or turning up on time for an exercise class. You may be able to come up with all kinds of good reasons why not to bother, but will that raise your morale and take you any closer to your goal? By taking action one small step at a time, you will move from thinking about what you want to actually working towards it. In the case of fitness; you’ll go from browsing fitness gear online, to buying some, to putting it on and working out. Each step will bring you closer to getting fitter and feeling better about yourself. If you challenge yourself to take action rather than wimping out, you’ll find your self-esteem also gets a boost.
The clock is ticking
“Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
It’s always easy to procrastinate and put that new start off until another day, but we all have a finite amount of time available to us, and none of us know what’s around the corner. Don’t waste time by not taking action – start moving towards your goals today.
