Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Take a quick inventory of yourself and your actions and habits. What are you doing that are less than pleased with? What should you be doing that you currently aren’t?
The first thing we have to promise ourselves is to be honest with ourselves. Rationalizing and making excuses to continue behavior we know deep down is wrong will not move us forward. We need to be open to changing. What got us here won’t get us where we want to go.
Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results is not the strategy to rely on. We need to employ the scientific method to find out what works for us. Be open to testing different approaches, measuring the results, and course correcting as needed.
This is how we become healthier, happier, richer.
The sooner we recognize issues that aren’t serving us and make changes, the quicker we can improve and rise. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
We have to live with what we can’t rise above.
Everything starts as an idea. Cultivate a mindset that generates positive, productive ideas. Then put those ideas to work on a consistent basis through developing habits and practices. Each small change consistently executed changes the direction of the ship. Over time this how we reap a destiny.
“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s all about eliminating poor habits and replacing them with good ones. Habits are consistent actions. Habits are concrete examples of persistency. Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity every time.
The operating principle of your new mindset is about taking charge of your life. That is the criteria to use for any decision we make: does it help us take charge of our life or does it hinder or offload that responsibility.
The direction of our life is the result of a continuous series of micro decisions. We make them all the time, all day every day. The cumulative effect of each little action needs to be in the direction of our goals. We need to set goals to know where we want to go.
“You have to know where you are going otherwise you may not get there. “
- Yogi Berra
How we get there is the result of the series of micro decisions we make and their cascading effects. As Benjamin Franklin said,
“Little strokes fell great oaks.”
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