Taking Action

Susan says: Boy that was a great blog that Jennifer wrote about goals and planning and planning to plan and spending time thinking about all the things we would like to do someday when we step out from in front of our TV. I found myself really rooting for her to use her 100 hours for noble productivity.

It’s a novel concept, that 100 hours. It’s easy to use the excuse that one can’t get anything done in the 15 minutes a day that she first suggested. One may even argue that so short a time is a good enough excuse not to do anything. After all, it only takes 15 minutes to check your email or look up that thing on YouTube and then there you are: Right back to surfing the web – that viral activity that is so much like a vacuum.

So the question really should be, if you had 15 minutes, what would you do? Let’s imagine it’s going to go down in history as the most important 15 minutes of your day. Jennifer and I have this discussion often: “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” I read that in a book on depression one time. Of course I was reading a book on depression because I suppose I was feeling badly about not doing anything. The author was suggesting that, rather than not doing something because we are afraid of doing it badly (leading perhaps to depression), we should just do it, even if we do it badly, since the doing of something is better than doing nothing. It makes us feel better because we are taking action.

So how do we get ourselves to take action? Well according to my good friend Tony Robbins, when it comes down to it, the thing that stops us from taking action is inner conflict. Some internal message is conflicting: you want to have total free time, but you want to build an empire, or you have the talent and ability to achieve it, but a part of you doesn’t think you deserve it. This kind of conflict is what stands in the way of us taking action.

We must ask ourselves the hard questions (just for a moment so as not to use it as a further excuse for non-action) about what our conflicts are. What is it that makes us stay at the computer surfing when we know we have that writing course to finish? Or what is it that makes us stay and watch reruns when we also really want to learn to play the violin? It is impossible to take action when we are being pulled in two different directions. So we need to identify these conflicts, the two (or three or four) struggling directions, we need to identify what they are and then get clear about what we really value, what is really important to us. Notice which part of these conflicting beliefs is not serving us and then get our beliefs to align. If we get into alignment about what we really want, we will take action. It is the natural flow of things to take action when we are aligned. There is nothing left to stand in our way. We want to take action.

So, gotta go! Gotta take some action! I’m in the mood!