Direction. Desire is one thing, but you need to harness it by learning to stretch your competency. You must be willing to educate yourself in new ways. You might take a class or attend a seminar, read a new biography, participate in a webinar, ask for help or seek out mentors. Learn how others have achieved a goal, model it, and mimic their strategies while you carve out your own path. Be a student of life. Continue to read and expose yourself to new ideas. Never stop learning.
Discipline. Success is within your reach if you’re willing to be more consistent than ever before. You must establish habits and repeat them every day until they are second nature. Ask yourself, “What discipline could I consistently follow to get me where I want to be in my career?” Don’t think of discipline in a negative way. Think of discipline as the joyous pursuit of your dreams.
Distraction Radar. You inevitably will be distracted from your goals. Many things compete for your time — emails, phone calls, social media, television and the list goes on. The world will toss its agenda in front of you. You have to be savvy enough to recognize distractions and move them out of your way. Listen to those moments your distraction radar sounds a warning and take away these interruptions’ power to sap your time and energy.
To begin thinking more intentionally about these four attributes, ask yourself a few pointed questions tomorrow morning:
- What do I desire today?
- What direction will I take today?
- In which area will I be disciplined today?
- To which distractions will I not succumb today?
Plan how you’ll deal with resistance to change.
In order to continually implement these four attributes, you need a system — a framework — to which you continually return when you fall off the motivational wagon. It’s resistance at work, and it happens to the best of us. In Steven Pressfield’s book “The War of Art,” he puts it quite bluntly.
“Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable,” Pressfield writes. “Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.”
Start each day focused and productive.
How you wake up and start each day is vital to your levels of success in every area of your life. Author Hal Elrod makes a compelling case in “The Morning Miracle: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM).” He writes that “Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days — which inevitably create a successful life — in the same way that unfocused, unproductive and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive and mediocre days and ultimately a mediocre quality of life. By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.”
Aren’t you excited by those words? I know I am. Remember, when you start changing your habits, you are changing who you are becoming. It’s by far the greatest determinant in your quality of life now and in the future. Still, most people avoid change. This will not be you. This is your time to banish self-limiting thoughts and share your gifts with the world.
S.A.V.E. yourself from an unfulfilled life.
The framework that helped Hal Elrod can help you. He identifies six practices as Life S.A.V.E.R.S. Each letter signifies meaning.
The first “S” is for silence. Elrod starts his day silently to reduce stress and anxiety. During his silence, Elrod likes to meditate, pray, reflect, do some deep breathing and concentrate on gratitude.
