What area of your life are you struggling with and what would be the impact of making a change?
It might be that you want more purpose and meaning in your work, you want a promotion, you want to earn more money, you want to have more confidence, you want to enhance your relationships, you want to enhance you business, you want to maximise your ability to influence the team you lead, you want to make a difference and have a greater positive impact on the people and the world around you. Any of these resonate with you?
Or are you happy to keep things the way they are for the next year, 5 years, 10 years, the rest of your life?
I've been talking about it as a shift from Stuck to Strength. Others I've shared it with have called it Fear to Freedom and Victim to Conscious Leader. Whatever you call it, the symptoms seem to the same. Here's some examples of the common emotions, thought patterns and actions we see in Stuck and Strength:
Any of it sound familiar? Where are you on the continuum?
What needs to happen for you to move from Stuck to Strength?
If you do want to make change in any of the ways listed above, there is one thing you need to be very clear on.
Read that again - nothing changes if nothing changes. And nothing changes if you don't DO anything to make a change. Knowing or thinking are not the same as doing. Without action, nothing changes. Read that again too - without action, nothing changes. And the only person who can take that action that will make that change...is YOU!
Here's a 3-step strategy that I've developed that can take you from Stuck to Strength. At each stage, ask yourself the associated questions and you can even add your own as you develop this reflective practice:
Conscious: noticing and becoming aware of what is influencing the situation
Curious: seeking to understand and explore the situation and resources to draw on
Courage: deciding on and taking the first small step towards change and desired outcome
Now here are a couple of rules:
Thinking is great, writing is better. It doesn't matter whether it's a fancy journal or the back of an envelope, but it does matter that you write the answers to these questions. Trust me!
Do it now, make it a priority, don't say you don't have time because that's not true. Set a countdown timer on your phone for a maximum of 20 minutes and work through the questions. You can do anything for 20 minutes and if you can't do this, then obviously you don't want the change badly enough.
As per previous point, don't spend all day (or week!) on this. That's called procrastinating and you're probably avoiding action towards change, because it's not easy. It's not supposed to be! Someone once said to me 'done is better than perfect' and they are usually right. You don't need to have the all the answers and solutions, you just need one small action you're going to take.
Decide on and take that first, small courageous action ASAP. If you can't do it now, put it in your calendar for when you are going to do it, tell someone about it and ask them to keep you accountable or whatever else you need to do to make sure it happens.
When you take that first action, acknowledge it and celebrate it because you have demonstrated courage. Then, go through the process again if you need and decide on the next step you are going to take.
That will do for now I think. I'll leave you with this.
I'd love to hear about your experience of working through this strategy.
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