Tag: Action

Just Do It

Achieving Goals, Success

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

 

The slogan of Nike is “Just Do It”, which is a call to action, but the action is deeply personal. When we hear Just Do It we are directed in our minds to the thing we are unsure about, the thing we are scared to do, but we are drawn to doing. We all have things that we want to do but we don’t think we are able to do or we feel that it will end in failure, so we don’t even try. I think having such doubts comes from previous failure that hurt us deeply in the past, and have become a forgotten wound that has healed and left a scare deep in our subconscious.

There is a moment between when we think about doing this thing we are scared to do and our brains talking us out of it. It is this moment of a few seconds when if we don’t act then it is unlikely that we will Just Do It. Many of us feel that we need confidence before we can do new things or that we need courage to do it. Both of these are often true, but there is something that comes before confidence and courage. Before we can have confidence, or courage, I believe that we first need clarity, we need to know what our Why is. If we understand the reason why we do what we do we can understand everything that we do. It is the act of discovering our raison d’être, our reason for being. When we know our reason for being we develop confidence in our own abilities, fueled by our passion for what we value. First we need clarity, then we get confidence and then we take the step of Just Doing It by having the courage to give it a go.

Courage, by the way, is not having the confidence to do something before you do it, no, it is giving it a go even if you are scared. The courage always comes with being scared, and the more scared you are the more courage you need to give it a go anyway. The clarity we have in what we believe and value is a sort of compass pointing us in the direction our soul wants us to go to and our confidence is a platform we can use to jump from when we take risks and try new things.

I have had a difficult time over the past decade when my confidence has been shaken to its core and anxiety seemed to take over my everything. However, I am taking back my confidence and my courage by finding clarity and being willing to give new things a go. I know that you can do the same. We have all had things that have knocked us down, but it is not about how many times we get knocked down but how many times we get back up. If we always get up one more time than we get knocked down we can rebuild, restore and move forwards. As long as we are moving forwards baby steps count too. So think of that thing you are putting off doing and Just Do It.

 

Something to reflect on:

Knowing thyself is the key to success at anything. Clarity leads to confidence, which leads to courage. Whatever is in your heart to do, just do it.

 

How to be more confident

Success

“Your doubts will create mountains. Your actions will move them.”

– Mel Robbins

 

This post is going to be a brief summary of Mel Robbin’s ‘Confidence Crash Course Livestream’ that was replayed on YouTube. It is an outstanding exploration of what confidence actually is and how to manage the self sabotage that gets in the way of us being more confident. I have added in here and their my own take on what was said in this livestream. There is a link at the bottom of the post to the YouTube video to watch the hour and a half video chocked full of good advice. I recommend watching it as there is a lot of content that I have not included here, as there is not enough space in a blog post to cover it all.

 

Myths about confidence

  1. Confidence is a personality trait

  2. Confidence is fixed

  3. Confidence starts with belief

 

Truths about confidence

  1. Confidence is a skill

  2. Confidence is situational

  3. Confidence begins with action

 

There are areas in our lives that we feel more and less confident in, which shows that it  really does depends on the situation we are in more than our overall confidence as a person. Knowing that confidence begins with action means that we have control over our confidence, because…

 

Confidence is the decision to try

 

A lot of people feel less confident when starting something new, but it is key to remember that you are always going to either succeed or survive. Either way you will learn something new. It can help to remember Mel’s definition of confidence and replace the word ‘confidence’ with ‘the willingness to try’. This then becomes actionable and we can take the action we need to, so we can take control of the situation we are in and work towards a positive outcome.

 

Self doubt is the decision not to try

 

Self doubt is also a decision to avoid taking the action that we do not want to take. It often has become a habit to doubt ourselves rather than trust that our inner voice is capable of directing us in the right direction.

 

Wise words: “Your doubts will create mountains.

Your actions will move them.”

 

The 4 traps of self doubt

  1. Hesitating

  2. Hiding

  3. Hypercritical

  4. Helplessness

 

Hesitating

  • Triggered by uncertainty
  • Waiting
  • Overthinking
  • Wanting your work to be perfect

You will never find the right time to do something. The only solution when we are hesitating is to just do it. When we are waiting to avoid something the solution is to just take action. If we are overthinking a decision it can help to ask someone else to make the decision for us. Many of us are perfectionists and this is also a way of hesitating and avoiding taking action. Remember that ‘good is gold,’ the only person that thinks that it needs to be perfect is us. Good is good enough. Hesitating is a way of staying in control, but it causes us not to take advantage of opportunities. The only answer to avoiding hesitation is to take action.

 

Hiding

  • Triggered by fear
  • Avoiding people/calls
  • Being silent
  • Being a chicken about money and terms
  • Procrastinating
  • Not talking to new prospects

We avoid the actions that we fear, but saying that we can’t talk to that person or we can’t make that call is wrong. What we actually mean is that we don’t talk to that person or make that call. Avoiding it is a choice that we have control over, we just have to bite the bullet and do it. Procrastinating is another way of hiding from the thing we don’t want to do, it is a way to be in control. We don’t know what will happen when we take action, but we will either succeed or survive.

 

Hypercritical

  • Triggered by past failures
  • You argue against yourself
  • You focus on the reasons why you can’t
  • You fixate on what could go wrong
  • Your stress has an edge

Often we are hardest on ourselves. We say negative things to ourselves in our heads that we wouldn’t say to anyone else, because they are so harsh. We argue with ourselves, saying things like, “I can’t do that” or “I’m going to fail,” while we are trying to convince ourselves to do something. We often fixate on what could go wrong, rather than what we could get right. Sometimes our stress has an edge to it, it seems quite serious, but only if we focus on the wrong things.

 

Strategies

  1. Break down big steps
  2. Take small moves forwards
  3. Record your progress

 

Helplessness

  • Triggered by low self worth
  • You actively play the victim
  • You know the solution
  • You may say that “nothing ever goes my way”
  • You’ve got all the excuses in the book

Actively playing the victim means that we don’t have to take responsibility for things, even when we know the solution we avoid taking action. When something does not go to plan saying “nothing ever goes my way” is another way of not taking responsibility. As is coming up with a long list of excuses. If we own our mistakes we can always find a success in the situation.

 

Wise word: “The problem isn’t knowing what you want.

The problem is having the courage to say it.”

 

The 4 traps of self doubt are learned behaviour

 

Many of us are clear on what we want, we just don’t want to admit it, because we would then have to do something about it and take action. We need to ask ourselves, “Do we have self doubt or a habit of doubting ourselves?” Self doubt is a learned behaviour, often from the people we have spent the most time with. Knowing this means that we can change our behaviour to actions that serve us better. The ingredient we are missing is courage. To get from clarity, which is knowing what we want, to confidence, which gets us what we want, we have to have courage. We have to just do it, even if we are anxious or nervous, because courage is not the absence of fear, it is taking action even when you are scared to do it. Confidence is at the other side of courage.

 

Clarity > Courage > Confidence

 

Wise Words: “Changing is hard.

You don’t have to go through it alone.”

 

One of the best things we can do is to try and bounce back after failure. One strategy to do this is to write a list of all of the failures that we are mentally carrying around with us. All of the failures that we cannot let go of. Then, to write down one important lesson we learned from each one of them. This releases the burden of carrying the failure around, because we begin to treat the failure as a positive thing that can help us move forward.

 

Wise words: “If you have a problem that can be

solved with action, you don’t have a problem.”

 

It is important to focus on what you can control and let go of what you cannot control. We often spend a lot of time and mental energy worrying about things that we have no control over. Mel, during the live stream, had a few technical problems at the beginning, but she kept on going. She focused on what she was saying and the content that she wanted to deliver, which she had full control over. The result was that the message got across and the content hit home. If she had given up at the first sign of technical trouble then she would not have impacted the 1500 or so people that tuned in to the live stream and the countless others who have watched the YouTube replay. Focus on what you can control.

 

A technique that Mel Robbins talks a lot about is the 5 second rule. This is used when you have anxiety rise up and your frontal cortex, the thinking, rational part of the brain, shuts down and the amygdala, the emotional, fight or flight part of the brain, takes over. You simply say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which switches the frontal cortex back on and you think of your anchor thought. Your anchor thought is something that make you feel good or that you can get excited about. For me it is thinking about seeing my Wife and daughter at the end of the working day. The reason this works is that the body has the same physiological behaviour when you are anxious and when you are excited, the only difference is what your brain thinks about it. So, telling yourself that you are excited about whatever it is, your brain calms down and the anxious feeling goes away. It is a technique that can really work when the panic begins to set in when you are in a stressful situation.

 

And finally, the take away message is that a negative mindset does not serve you. So actively removing the negative mindset when it shows up and replacing it with a positive mindset is really important for a happier and more successful life, and a more fulfilling life as a result. If you have found this information useful please do watch the full video by clicking on this link (Confidence Crash Course Livestream Replay) and check out Mel Robbin’s YouTube channel, her books and her website, www.melrobbins.com.  Keep on working towards your dreams, and remember, fulfilment is a path that we walk together.

 

#LiveDeeply