Moving Day
photo credit: unsplash.com/AnetaIvanova
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. ”
— Saint Teresa of Calcutta
The whole point of making good decisions is ACTING on those decisions. Clarity comes after action, not before. You cannot wait to have everything figured out before you act. Sometimes you’ve just got to leap and have faith.
Discovering what you don’t want is often just as critical to making a good decision and taking positive action steps as honing in on what you do want. All of this searching leads us to the point where we need to take some form of action. You cannot read, research or even think your way into your best life. You must ACT.
In their ground-breaking book, Execution: The Art of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan highlight keys to successful execution for business leaders. These principles can be directly applied to all aspects of our lives. The authors state:
Execution is a discipline. It is “a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it.”
The key word there is systematic. Quite often we are hit and miss in our execution in our personal and professional lives. In our jobs, we are typically required to identify goals and work toward them over the course of a year. In our personal lives, most of us aren’t as systematic about identifying specific goals, putting a timeframe around them and working toward achieving those goals. We tend to have those “some day” or “one day” goals. “Some day” I’ll get that garage cleaned out. “One day” I’ll start that project I’ve been thinking about. The problem is that without structure and a specific deadline, “some day” and “one day” never arrive.
Putting structure and deadlines on our ideas and decisions feels very unsafe. The “what if’s” flood in and we are paralyzed to move forward for fear of failure. Start small. Take that big decision and break it down into small but significant pieces. Perhaps you’ve decided to make a lifestyle change – downsize, upsize, reduce your carbon footprint, reduce your waistline, upgrade your vehicle. Whatever the change, you’ve decided and taking action looms like the forbidding clouds of a hurricane about to happen. Start small but significant. It has to take some effort but not so much that you get overwhelmed and quit. Don’t forget to track your progress…and not just in your head. Write it down. Make it visual. Kids aren’t the only ones who respond to sticker charts. When you measure it you are more realistic about where you need to tweak and when you need to take the time to celebrate forward progress. (My recommendation is OFTEN!)
The foundation you build your life upon determines the decisions you make in your life. The action you take from those decisions determine the direction your life takes. Today is moving day. Let’s go!