By Ahsan
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” Babe Ruth
Have you ever looked at doing something new and audacious but talked yourself out of it?
Perhaps you felt it was too complicated, or you said something to yourself like: "I don't have the experience or credentials to do that…no one will take me seriously ...it won't work!"
Meanwhile, you find out that someone did exactly what you wanted to do⎯with half the smarts, experience and good looks that you have!
What’s going on here?
In terms of how they did it, one word encapsulates the thing they employed that you likely forgot: CONFIDENCE. Another word for confidence is courage.
To achieve anything in life, you need to take that first step. Taking the step in the first place makes all the difference! Confidence is the mother of all achievement. It gives birth to all other qualities, including courage, belief, desire, motivation, learning, mastery, resilience and persistence, to name a few.
A boxer without confidence gets knocked out. In fact, if you meet a professional boxer you might think they are pompous and conceited while the truth is they are actually supremely confident. Without confidence, the journey stays very local. You don't go far. You may also get knocked out!
How you look at life makes for how life treats you. If you see the best in others, your social interactions will be happier. If you are optimistic, you will try to see the best in a bad situation. If you think about the possibilities of the future, your life will take on momentum. Do all this with a mindset of confidence.
If you think like a confident winner, you will dominate the field!
Now that you agree that having confidence is paramount to achieving anything in life let's think about taking ACTION.
I have found that having an action plan matters because it provides a map to the treasure. When you have a goal, start making a plan of what you need to do. Let the plan be about taking cues from others that are achieving what you want. Follow the path of others that have gone before you. Study them, take them to lunch and make good notes.
And be ready to change course. When we begin acting on the plan, we can find roadblocks and disappointments, but we should not be dismayed. We need to confidently moor in the direction of our goal by changing the action plan.
Action plans that have high levels of success need to be executed within the framework of a SYSTEM.
Let's take the goal of getting healthy: the action plan could be as obtuse as I will start eating healthy and go to the gym or….it could be systematized with more concrete actions that deliver more robust and predictable results.
Instead of pie in the sky, random actions use a system that is made up of actions, for example:
After eating dinner go exercise for at least 30 minutes. When eating at a restaurant, eat the least processed food by studying the menu online before you go. Drink water first thing in the morning and after each meal to hydrate. To lower stress, do something you enjoy daily like reading, writing or prayer. To wake up rested, go to sleep at the same time each night.
You may like to set aside one day a week where you have a 45 minute meeting with yourself to review last week’s efforts and plan out the coming week. This is how a system works compared to leaving your intentions of getting healthy to your mood or busy schedule. Doing things this way will establish a life-long pattern.
In other words, you will need to make a HABIT of doing what you need to do. We all rise to the level of our habits. Going back to the idea of getting healthy, we need to have confidence that we can do it regardless of our age or busy life. We need an action plan that takes on the shape of a system that we are in the habit of doing.
You might be thinking that everything so far sounds logical, but the challenge is in forming a repeatable habit that sticks. I could not agree with you more.
The best idea I came across to form a habit is twofold: start it as though your life depends on it and create the right environment for executing the habit. Back to getting healthy, remind yourself that being healthy is critical to having a productive life and remove all the potato chips, chocolate and muffins from your house, so you don't get tempted to eat the junk!
So, do you have enough CASH?
Confidence
Actions
Systems
Habits
Why not incorporate this framework for success and let us know how you do.
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