Posts tagged Many People
How to Make BIG Leaps With Just a Step a Day
Sep 19th
What if you took just ONE step closer to your goals every single day?
Just one.
It sounds harder than it is.
Honestly.
Let’s say your goal is to write a book. Many people have this on their “things to do before I die” lists so I know this resonates with a lot of you.
What is the absolute first step? Decide what to write about. This step looks simple but you need to see if people would read it, if publishing houses would buy it, if there’s a market so it will actually sell.
So maybe the first two weeks is spent checking all that out.
The rest of the month might be outlining the whole book – what do you need to cover, how many chapters? Etc, etc.
And then comes the writing. Now if I were coaching you, I’d make you write at least 5 minutes a day because writers WRITE.
To some, that seems like nothing much but 5 minutes a day is 35 minutes a week which is over 2 hours a month, at the very least.
And of course, some days just getting those 5 minutes done will be a miracle;) but other days, you’d spend 30 minutes or more easily writing.
That’s exactly what I mean when I say you can make big leaps with just a step a day.
People ask me how I get so many things done and it’s because I do exactly this.
Now I will tell you I don’t always feel like writing or recording audio or _______ (fill in whatever you don’t like doing) but I do know that it will move me towards my goals.
I have a rule. EVERY WEEK, come hell or high water, I need to do AT LEAST one thing to move me towards my goals. This helps me focus on outcomes even when I’m really busy.
Think about one of your goals. Let’s say you want to go on a holiday to Ireland;)
Let’s break it down.
1.Decide exactly where in Ireland you want to visit.
2.Investigate prices of airfare, hotels, B&B’s, tourism, food, etc.
3.Check your savings account to see what you have available.
4.Based on the shortfall, decide on the amount of money you need to save every month.
5.Decide length of holiday and itinerary while there.
6.Book flights and check if you need a visa.
7.Book accommodation.
8.Book car rental/ decide on method of transport.
9.Pack your bags
10.Go!
Grab a piece of paper and write your own steps for your goal.
Your challenge this week is to take at least ONE step towards your goal this week.
Successful Thinking – How Are You Defining You?
Sep 19th
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.” Virginia Satir (1916 – 1988)
This quote inspired me into remembering that life is not about what others think about us. Life – Success, Health, Wealth, Money, Happiness for that matter – is what we think about ourselves. But turn the quote around, because perhaps more importantly, how often do we allow our own limited perceptions to define us? By limiting the potential that we allow ourselves and others to see within us how far short do we stop of our own greatness?
I posed this question to a group of like-minded entrepreneurs recently and a great friend and mentor shared this story with me:
“Twenty years ago I met a great wizard in Maui. He taught me many lessons. The most important was when he told me… “John, I can be no more for you than you allow me to be.” You see many people saw him only as a street person because he lived so simply. It was my choice to either see him as a wizard who taught me important lessons… or just an impoverished old man. In reality he was a famous Mexican artist who had taken a vow of poverty and given his wealth to his children. I wonder how many saw St. Francis merely as a beggar and missed the larger message. I learned from him to keep my heart open and listen carefully without judging.” Hand on heart, are you able to listen carefully to yourself, without judging?
We pigeon-hole ourselves, just as we have been conditioned to pigeon-hole others and within that category comes a whole set of perceived and limiting belief systems, ‘can dos’ and ‘can’t dos’.
Have you ever been ‘surprised’ by somebody who suddenly acted in a manner you didn’t think was ‘them’?… Ask yourself why. If you were truly open to the possibilities and potential of that person, why would you be surprised by anything they did? Chances are, you were only surprised because they stepped outside of the pigeon hole you had neatly placed them into.
Now turn that thinking around to yourself. How do you define You? What limiting perceptions have you defined yourself by? How hard is it to step outside that ‘comfort zone’ you have built for yourself? Far better to dismantle the railings altogether. When was the last time you had the courage to step outside of your self-imposed beliefs about ‘You’ and instead of living in your pigeon-hole, had a day where you allowed yourself to be bigger than the ‘Real You’, to be more than you thought you could be? Imagine how great you could be if you weren’t ‘You’?
It is one of life’s eternal quests, to find out ‘who we really are’, yet in doing this, aren’t we really just limiting ourselves and defining ourselves by who we were yesterday? Because the only way we can truly know who we are is by experiencing it. Having experienced that moment, it automatically becomes past tense. So the only way to truly know who we ‘are’ is to define ourselves by who we ‘were’. And that is very limiting.
A better question to ask ourselves is ‘Who am I becoming?’ Now that is truly liberating. Now we have a blank canvass to explore and the fun can begin. When we stop worrying about who we are and start wondering about who we are becoming, suddenly there are no limits, no boundaries, no perceptions. The answer can be anything we want it to be. The only thing stopping us is the limit on our current thinking. And now the door to the whole topic that is ‘Personal Development’ stands wide open. How big is your current thinking and how quickly can you expand on that – because that is how big you really are… that is how great you are truly becoming!
