3 Steps for Putting Your Plan Into Action
Think you’re not ready yet? Think again! All the best intentions, talk, and magazine articles in the world won’t change your life unless you actually have that “I-can-totally-do-this” kind of moment and push yourself into high gear. We often think there will be this spotlight from the sky event illuminating the exact right moment when we should get started on a journey toward our goals. But let me tell you, that “I’ll start on Monday mentality” might keep you from ever getting where you need to go. Planning, planning, planning (yeah, like procrastinating) but never executing—if this is you, this is your time to make it happen.
Here are my three steps for making the shift from plan to purposeful execution.
1. Identify the goal: You’ve got to be super-specific, keep it reasonable, write it down, and hang it up. If your goal is to lose weight, don’t just say to yourself, “I’m going to work on losing a few pounds.” Instead, grab your favorite pen, write down exactly how many pounds you want to lose (keep it sensible), your time frame (½ to 2 pounds a week is doable), and put that note somewhere you’ll see it (like your fridge).
2. Get Support: Doing it alone is challenging, and to really progress, we often need someone, or something, to propel us in the direction of our dreams. When you invest your time, energy, and dollar toward meeting your goal, you’re more likely to make that goal a reality. As you start moving, and get that push you need forward and in the right direction, the momentum generated is unstoppable.
3. Baby-Steps to Hard-Core: A client once told me that she was taking baby-steps to hard-core. While some people can just bang it out with sheer determination and will-power, the rest of us regular folk need to inch our way, day by day, in the direction of our ultimate objective. When consistently executed, those baby-steps will eventually lead to hard-core transformation.
To move ahead, you’ve got to get started. You can either continue to think about, talk about, and dream about your goals, or you can actually start (like right this minute) on your way to making it happen. Trust me, you’re ready right now. Now, get to it!
About the Author
5 Ways to Discover Purpose and Abundance in a World that has Forgotten
As I read the seemingly innocent letter, I could feel a pit churning in my stomach. We have been ingesting this devastating message since we were so very young, in many innocuous ways.
My daughter is 7 years old. The letter was from her school. Over the next month, all the 2nd graders would be tested by the Gifted and Talented Program. So there it was, the blatant societal assertion that some children/people are gifted and talented while others are not.
I travel all over the world teaching yoga and am continually heartbroken to find that 99% of the people I encounter have a persistent, nagging sense of “not enough”. Not smart enough, not pretty enough, not wealthy enough, not fit enough, not wise enough, not patient enough, not talented enough, not spiritual enough, not worthy enough, simply not good enough. Could this be the root of so much of our stress and dis-ease? As a yoga therapist, working to change this deeply seeded, incorrect assumption has proven time and again to be paramount in the healing process.
The truth is, everyone has gifts. Everyone is talented. Everyone is essential to life. What each and every one of us is, is something so much more than simply enough. Yet this persistent belief of inherent lack endures because in so many ways we have forgotten.
