One way of increasing the likelihood you’ll take some desired action, is the ability to look at a goal, plan or task in a different, more inspiring way.
If it doesn’t provide a big enough reason for you to take action, you most certainly won’t take it.
Human beings get stuck in persistent patterns of thinking that frame the subjects of those thoughts in a certain way, and moving beyond these frames of reference can be very difficult if left unchallenged.
For individuals, such thoughts often centre around self-doubt. Self talk may go along the lines of “I can’t do [blank]”,” I don’t have the necessary experience, skill-set, knowledge, resources, etc”.
Businesses can also display this negative thinking; “we can’t compete with [blank]”, “we can’t compete on price” etc.
So what is the consequence of thinking like this? Well, we don’t take action, we don’t even try it, we just talk ourselves out of it and move on.
Maybe this is the right thing to do, maybe thinking abstractly against it is better than ploughing time, effort and resources into a doomed endeavour, maybe, but maybe not.
If we’re not careful, this way of thinking becomes a coping strategy that lets us off the hook and allows us to not take action in an act of self preservation. They become coping excuses.
A more productive way of thinking about it may be in asking “what if”. What if we did this, and what is the possible upside?
“What if” is a creative question. It opens up possibilities, rather than shutting them down. What if we could reframe the way we think about our weaknesses, and recast them as strengths?
In 1962 advertising executive Paula Green came up with a now famous slogan for Avis car rentals, that took advantage of their weaker market position in relation to Hertz, repositioning it from a weakness into a strength. The slogan “we try harder” let prospective customers know Avis would be more attentive to their needs than Hertz would be.
Stella Artois did something similar with their “reassuringly expensive” advertising campaign in 2004.
It’s all about finding a more empowering story that reframes your perceived weakness into strengths, for your own benefit, and also from a marketing point of view.
Here are a few examples:
Smaller size; being smaller allows you to be more nimble and adaptable than big players
Less experienced; don’t have as much skin in the game, nothing to lose by doing things differently and disrupting the status quo
Less prestigious location; can provide better value for money because not paying as much in rental costs.
Stop EXPECTING – nobody owes you anything. Be grateful for the time, interest, and generosity of other people. You have no entitlement to anything in life, everything is a gift.
If you’ve been born into a loving family, count yourself lucky, many don’t enjoy that privilege. It’s not like you did anything to deserve it, you were and are just really lucky that circumstances fell in your favour.
If you were born with good health – physical and psychological – you were and are just lucky, many people aren’t blessed in that way.
Be grateful for every day you’re above ground and in the company of people who choose to spend their precious time with you.
Even if you’re not born into a loving family, or you don’t have good mental or physical health, look for the things you can be grateful for. Do you have sight, hearing, are you able form and maintain relationships with other people, are there things you can do that others can’t? Are you free of pain, at least some of the time? Do you have anyone who cares about you?
It’s okay to Feel sorry for yourself sometimes, you should face your negative emotions, but don’t let them consume you, because it doesn’t help you to make things better. Prolonged negative reminiscing will only poison your mind and body.
Be grateful for even the smallest blessings. When you change how you think about the world, the world changes.
It’s important to understand that your attention and perceptions are goal dependant. When you task yourself with finding the great things in life, the world lays itself out around that goal. Your perceptions are motivated to help you attain whatever goal you set your sights on. Here’s a little game to illustrate how that plays out.
So you can pick the goal of playing victim and wallow in self-pity or you can empower yourself with the goal of finding light in the darkness, using gratitude, the choice is yours.
We can probably all agree that being able to get results and achieve success is no bad thing, after all we are exploratory creatures. We aren’t designed to rest on our laurels and be satisfied with what we have. We always want to have more and to be better. We can try to fight our nature, but it’s a constant battle to engage in.
It’s also important to be grateful for the things we have, and to enjoy the fruits of our labour and the rewards of our love, otherwise, what’s the point.
But forward momentum is part of our genetic makeup, and it’s easier to face that truth than deny it.
We currently find ourselves stuck at point A, when we want to get to point B.
Point B is the promised land. It’s the place we aspire to be, if only we could get there. There may well be many smaller intermediary goals that point towards the end destination, and like dominos we need to line them up so each can help knock down the next.
Having a goal gives us a sense of direction, otherwise we are aimless, like a rudderless boat drifting wherever the current takes us. Goals allow us to take strategic action.
The consequences of not moving forward towards goals, towards point B, can be hard to stomach. The initial frustration is later replaced by regret and both these negative emotions drain self-esteem. A disaffected person can easily become embittered and take a destructive path which aims to tear things down rather than contribute to make things better.
We can all have more by being more. To have more than you’ve got, you’ve got to be more than you are, according to self-development guru, Jim Rohn.
Most things in life are unknown to us in any meaningful way. We know just enough about things to get through our daily routines, but meaning is condensed into abstract representations which allow us to manage our interactions with them, but little more.
This condensing of meaning lightens cognitive load, and allows us to focus attention on more important things, usually in pursuit of our goals. Everything is an aid, an obstruction or irrelevant in pursuit of whatever we’re busy aiming for.
For example, if we’re driving down to the supermarket in a bit of a hurry because it’s about to close, every red light, or motorist is an obstruction acting to block our goal.
Everything that’s irrelevant to our goal is ignored or filtered out, most of the time. It doesn’t affect us and our current endeavour so we need not pay any attention to it.
The same is true with regard to the attainment of knowledge, we are motivated to learn things that interest or concern us, but everything else is ignored or filtered out of our conscious attention.
As a consequence of our limited knowledge, most things are unknown. We may know things on a superficial level, especially if we are curious, or as a result our life experiences, but there is always much more to learn, then we could ever know.
The unknown can be a scary place, it’s full of potential, made up of good and bad. The unknown is full of opportunities and possibility as well as risks and dangers. We’ll come back to the unknown shortly.
Learning new things involves finding accurate information, and as most information is not acquired from personal first-hand experience, we must find it from other reliable sources.
However, this is easier said than done, although we have more access to information than ever before, there is so much more misleading and incorrect information that has to be sorted through, to find the golden nuggets that will actually help us.
It’s all about learning what we need to move from point A to point B, and this can take a great deal of time and dedication to do. We have to do our research, find the nuggets of information we can use, put that into practice and learn through the experience of doing. It’s a process of learning, trying and failing (if we must), there isn’t really any other way to do it. Try to get better at filtering out the things that will cause you to fail, but don’t fear failure, just make sure you learn from it, and try to ensure it doesn’t put you out of the game completely.
Coming back to the unknown, any kind of meaningful change requires reaching into the unknown as we search for answers to help us move forward. If you’re not taking the actions you know you should be taking, then something is preventing you.
Fear is usually the most frequent reason people don’t chase down their goals. Fear of failure, of discomfort, of uncertainty, of embarrassment if things don’t work out as planned. Fear is even more persuasive if you lack confidence in your ability to do what’s required, or in case you find yourself out of your depth.
The unknown carries within it the monster of all monsters. It is a category of threat that holds all possible fears. But we also realise that the unknown is made up of all potential: all risks and dangers, but also all opportunities and possibilities.
The self-preservation instinct is often our guide within the unknown domain. It’s the biological reflex which causes us to freeze, take flight or fight. It’s easy to fall foul of this initial gut-reaction, which has little interest in anything other than protecting us from pain or suffering. If all you do is listen to your survival instinct, you’re certain to remain stuck at point A.
It’s useful to understand that motivation has two opposing forces: Blocking motivations like fear, but also supporting motivations that help propel us forward towards our goals.
With a shift in perspective, you can make use of the fear impulse to move you forward. Use the fear of regret to propel you towards your goals. Imagine looking back at your life as an old man or woman, having not pursued your goals or dreams. How would you feel about living a life only half lived? Regret can be a positive emotion if you harness it to support your progress.
If you’re anxious about doing something you need to do, you instinctively know that you’re lacking in some department. You have a realisation at some level that you need to learn or acquire something that you don’t currently possess. Carl Jung once said, “That which we need the most will be found where we least want to look”.
Finding inspiration within your belief system will sustain your journey towards your goals.
We weave beliefs into stories that we tell ourselves, and which subsequently guide our behaviours and actions. If your story isn’t serving you, change it for a more inspiring story.
The move from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be), is a journey, a journey of transformation. It’s like any story you’ve read in a book or watched on a screen.
You are the hero of your own story, of your own journey. Like all the great fictional heroes, you have something you need to learn in order to make yourself a better version of who you currently are. You have to find the courage to face your fears and still move forward. Solve your own problems, face your own demons, and you will be stronger for it.
Pick a goal and plot a path forward that inspires and excites you, focus on that path, learn what needs to be learned so you improve as you journey forward. Embrace the challenges and solve the problems that block your path. Each win gives you the ammunition to fight the next battle, all the while you get stronger and more competent to deal with ever bigger problems. If you can pick a goal that also solves other people’s problems, you’re probably onto a winner.
Get Results: Productivity requires better decision making and problem solving
Different situations impact the way we make decisions. To illustrate this point, if you’re trying to lose weight, you generally only have to consider your own motivations. For instance you have to work out how to reduce the desires that get in your way, like wanting to eat fatty foods.
In contrast, if you’re marketing and trying to persuade strangers to buy from you, considerations are very different. You’re not in direct control of what others do, you can only encourage and influence, and so there is an extra level of complexity to how you make your own decisions.
The Cynefin framework provides five decision-making contexts;
Simple (has recently changed to obvious),
Complicated,
Complex,
Chaotic,
Disorder,
which helps managers identify how they may perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behaviour.
Get Results: cynefin framework
The Cynefin framework is based on research from systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theories according to Wikipedia.
It has been used by its IBM developers in policy-making, product development, market creation, supply chain management, brand and customer relations. As well as by governments and the military along with health care research by the NHS.
Disorder
If you don’t know where you are, if you feel lost, you are probably in the domain of disorder. Within the domain of disorder, there is no clarity about which of the other domains apply to your current situation.
You may experience multiple perspectives, that could all equally be valid. “Leaders may argue with one another and cacophony likely rules”, says Snowden and Boone.
To find a way out of this domain, you must break down the situation into its constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms.
First gather information, then identify the domain and move on.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing everything is simple and ordered, or that past success makes you invulnerable to future failure. This is a big mistake, because before you know it, the chaotic domain will drag you into a crisis.
Chaos
When the s**t hits the fan and all hell breaks loose, the first response is instinctive, the freeze, flight or fight response kicks in. It’s our primordial response for self preservation.
In this domain, cause and effect is unclear, and too confusing for knowledge based responses. In fact, previous knowledge and experience is only partially useful in chaotic situations.
Remove yourself from danger, in the first instance, try to regroup and do what you can to move from the chaotic domain into the complex domain, using novel practice if you have to.
Action mode
ACT really…trust your instinct….get out of the immediate danger zone
SENSE once out of the immediate danger zone, assess the situation and determine your next steps.
RESPOND take action to move your problem to another domain
Complex
In this domain, the relationship between cause and effect is only possible through retrospective analysis. It’s a case of the truth being out there somewhere. There are no right answers, as such, we can draw only instructive patterns from them. The best way to navigate in this domain is through trial and error, via experimentation.
We often have to engage in emerging practice, where the path will be created with every step taken. It’s a case of testing as you go and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and learning from your failures.
The complex domain represents the “unknown unknowns”.
I was introduced to the concept of complexity when reading “Brave new work by Aaron Dignan”, where he discusses how companies can become more “adaptive and human” by becoming more “complexity conscious.”
Let’s assume you’re a marketer who wants prospects to buy your product. What do you need to do to get them to act? You can only encourage them to buy from you if you match their buying criteria. You must present your offer in a way that compels them to make a purchase. It’s important to realise that it’s not under your complete control, as with your own actions. If they like what they see, they may buy from you, providing the price is right, they trust you and you’ve given them enough reasons to part with their hard earned money.
RESPOND take action moving the problem into the complicated domain
Complicated
In the complicated domain, the relationship between cause and effect may consist of a range of right answers, rather than just one. It requires some expertise to navigate in this domain, like you would find with engineers, surgeons and lawyers. It’s the domain of known unknowns.
You’re looking for an expert to show you the best way.
You can make use of a blueprint to get from A to B.
It’s a case of 1 + 1 =2
Action mode
SENSE the problem
ANALYZE the problem and roadmaps
RESPOND with a plan
Simple
In the simple/obvious domain, the relationship between cause and effect is clear cut: if you do X, you can expect Y to happen. It’s the domain of the known knowns.
Snowden and Boone (2007) offer the example of loan-payment processing. An employee identifies the problem, for example, a borrower has paid less than required, the employee categorises it, by reviewing the loan documents, and responds by following the terms of the loan.
It is the domain of the 1 way solution. A simple case of 1 + 1 = 2
Action mode
SENSE the situation. Establish the facts.
CATEGORISE the situation into a known bucket
RESPOND with a well-known solution, following the rules or applying best practice.
Sometimes you can move through these domains, other times a particular decision lives in just one. The main takeaway is to understand that all problems are not equal and that different approaches are required for different situations.
The status quo seems to have around it some kind of gravity force, which holds us back from moving away from it, towards our goals.
It’s the duel force of fear and anxiety which comes along with the uncertainty of what might lay ahead, particularly when we’re doing something different or new.
It’s so much easier to play safe and stick with our current routine. In our present situation or circumstance we know what to expect, and we know we can deal with most eventualities. There is nothing too scarey to worry about.
Humans don’t deal well with change, it’s fear inducing to trample unexplored territory. There are too many monsters lurking in the darkness, metaphorically speaking.
Our survival instincts have conditioned our brains to avoid anomaly and change at all costs, and the easiest way to do this is to play it safe. Do what we know and keep doing it as long as we can.
At the same time, we like to experience good surprises, like the unexpectedly win or gain of something we value. So uncertainty is good as long as it’s a promise of good.
So wandering away from the status quo is possible, providing we have something positive enough to aim for.
All change has within it, potential, which can be either good or bad. There are risks and dangers, as well as possibilities and opportunities.
We have to find a positive reason to make change, and we have to have the vision of a better alternative than the one we are currently experiencing.
We also have to believe that the cost of not pursuing our goals will deliver such regret that we just won’t be able to bear it in the years to come. This kind of fear propels us forward, rather than holds us back.
Finding the motivation to take action is all about shifting mindset. It’s about hacking the way we think, from something that holds us hostage, into something that opens us up to a new, exciting way forward.
If you want something enough, you’ll find a way, if not, then maybe you just didn’t want it enough.
Having direction, gives meaning in life and results in positive emotion.
What should be? We’ll call it point B.
What is? We’ll call it point A.
How to transform A to B.
Be the Hero that voluntarily goes into the unknown, to learn what needs to be learned to convert A to B.
Be brave enough to deal with the dragon of fear and bring back the treasure that you find there, to improve your society for the good of all.
In a nutshell, this means being a problem solver. Start by solving your own problems; figure out what’s holding you back from the life you’d rather be living, and find a way of conquering them. Whether it be fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of being conflicted, lack of self-confidence, if you’re not where you want to be, something is holding you back.
Once you’re able to deal with your own problems on an ongoing basis, you can use the same principles that have helped you, for the benefit of other people. You will then be a master problem-solver, the Hero that goes out to slay the dragon of chaos and brings order to disorder, time and again.
Let’s assume you want to start your own business, and someone close to you tells you to stick it out where you currently are. After all, you’ve got a regular pay check, you know what you’re doing, you get on with colleagues, and you’re comfortable and safe.
They want to protect you, they don’t want you to suffer because they love you. This resonates with you because the same conflict is going on inside your head.
Doubts are designed to warn you of the potential dangers you may face and paying attention to them is wise. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead, it just means your plan needs to keep the pitfalls in mind, to mitigate them as much as possible.
The unknown is uncomfortable and exciting at the same time.
You feel alive because there is uncharted territory ahead, it’s a natural reaction, in the same way as a surprise or something unexpected grabs your attention from the slumber of your familiar routine. We have evolved to pay attention to change, to different, to new, because they are unknown.
The unknown has significance. Suddenly there is uncertainty, and risk, and you need to pay attention to it in case it hurts you. But don’t quit because of it. You can’t do anything different or new without encountering some level of unknown.
As well as paying attention to the possible dangers, give thought to the opportunities and possibilities that come out of change. You become more by experiencing more. Even failure can be a great teacher, so don’t fear it, just plan to mitigate it where possible.
The status quo is a lie, change is inevitable, whether you accept it our not. Face change, deal with change, take advantage of change.
Be a predator of chance rather than a victim of circumstance.
Reading quotes helps reshape beliefs and these are the foundation of motivation.
They can make a big difference in any journey for success.
Motivation is often the very thing that gets blocked and prevents you trying for your goals and dreams.
To take action you must be motivated, and to be motivated you must have congruent beliefs;
#1 – This is what you want, and
#2 – You can do it.
If either of these beliefs are absent from your belief system, you won’t take action.
Well formed quote graphics can help you look at your situation in a different way, to think about it from a different perceptive, to inspire you to take action. It helps you create a different story, or a different narrative on an old story.
A different story, analogy or metaphor, alongside an open mind can reshape or sidestep those disempowering beliefs, which are holding you back.
The first disempowering belief many of us are guilty of holding, is…
“I can’t do this!”
Or some variation of this such as..
“I don’t have the experience!”
“I don’t have the resources!”
Here are a few quotes from Jim Rohn to help you out of this mindset.
Get Results: Jim Rohn quotesGet Results: Jim Rohn quotesGet Results: Jim Rohn quotesGet Results: Jim Rohn quotesGet Results: Jim Rohn quotes get on the good side of lifeGet Results: Jim Rohn quotes
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