Do It Anyway!

“Weak is he who permits his thoughts to control his actions; strong is he who forces his actions to control his thoughts.” -Og Mandino, Scroll vI, “The Greatest Salesman in the World”

As I move through my life, I have become more aware of when I feel weak, and when I feel strong. (In fact, if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it; we use it in our X-CELS program to assist us in balancing our internal advisors.)

I have noticed that when I am in a less resourceful state, it is very easy to allow my thoughts to control my actions. Have you ever had a day where you didn’t feel like doing something, say, go to the gym, even though you knew that you would feel better on many levels afterward? So, you just didn’t do it? How did the rest of the day go? Did you feel guilty afterwards? Beat yourself up for not doing it?

My experience the other day, (the gym example), was that I kept saying ‘I should go.’ This just made me feel even worse and created a whole downward spiral of feeling crappy and sorry for myself as I procrastinated more and more. However, as I am aware of particular internal advisors right now, and the tone of their advice, I was able to acknowledge this procrastination, and accept that in the moment that I didn’t want to go to the gym.

Then, I went anyways! And am I glad I did! Afterwards, I felt much more energized, alive, alert, clear, and focused. This is not the first time that I have had this experience.

I have also had this experience with regards to writing articles, cleaning up around my home, and doing any number of mundane tasks that I normally don’t like to do. As Seth Godin likes to say: “ship it!” In other words, once the creative process plays out, TAKE ACTION!

What I have noticed is that by not doing these things, my mind then gets caught up in justifying why I didn’t do them, and I end up wasting a lot of time living in my head. However, once I actually do them, (and they usually don’t take as long as I thought they would), my mind is freer, clearer, amd more focused because the energy I was wasting justifying why or why not I could, should, or had to do things, was no free for other purposes, like creating new programs and presentations, writing articles, and being creative in general.

So, how do we put this into action? Especially when the lizard brain wants to react in fear and defense, to keep us from doing these things that we know we must in order to move forward.

In a recent article, I mentioned about how we build muscle. In the gym, it’s not the first few repetitions that build the muscle, but the last few. In stretching or pushing ourselves beyond where we’ve been before, we Discover new resources within us that we can use to Transform and Awaken our lives!

So, back to my question; How do we put this into action? (Hint: notice the repeated use of the word action?)

As the quote from Og suggests, when we take action even when we don’t want to, we build new muscles/resources. It often requires more than a couple of repetitions to really own the skills. Have you ever learned something new? How often did you have to practice to become good at it? How much did you practice to become really good at it? How often to master it? Yup, it requires us to work and be engaged in the process.

We all marvel at the Masters of the world in any discipline; they make whatever they are doing look easy. But, how much work have they done in the process that we don’t see? As somebody once said; ‘it took me years of work to be an ove
ight sensation.’

There will be times in the process when we want to give up and allow our thoughts to run our actions. There will be times when it feels like we can’t go on. However, we never know when or where the treasures await us. It might be around the next corner, or the corner after that. But we’ll never know if we don’t take a step; in other words take action.

So, who are you being called to be in your life, and what actions are you being called to take to BE that? Intuitively, we all have a sense of what the next action is. Maybe we can see it in our mind’s eye, or we hear a voice saying “go for it!” Perhaps it is simply an understanding of how the next step unfolds from where we are now, or a feeling we have somewhere in our body that says “yes!”

I invite you to Discover and play with how your own intuiton shows up. Invite it! Laugh with it! Play! The journey is more fun than we sometimes imagine!

I will act NOW!