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| CRBJ Home > February 2007 | |||||
The doing is the thingBy Iain Macfarlane
But life is not driven by academic interest. The real key to being successful is not in knowing what to do, it is actually taking action and getting started because you have a need, rather than just a want. If you looked at any specific aspect of your life, there is a high probability that you could sit down right now with a pen and paper and you could immediately write down 10 things about that aspect of your life that you should have done but you didn't do because you just didn't get started. In most situations it is not just about knowing what to do, it's not even about knowing how to do it. The real issue is about the motivation, about the inspiration, and about the desire to actually be doing it. The difference between 'getting started' and 'knowing' is the difference between must and want. Most overweight people want to be healthy and in almost every case they know how to be healthy. Starting to make this change is difficult. But a must is created after suffering a heart attack and the motivation to live will drive the person to make the lifestyle change out of necessity. Similarly, business owners want to be successful, want to have growth, want to have great profits. So why do they not take actions that they know need to be made to correct aspects of their business that need to be fixed? Retraining or replacing employees who don't have the appropriate skills for their function, shutting down a location or a product line that is not profitable, putting in a new computer system to improve productivity through systemizing versus throwing more people at the problem, borrowing against an activity that has the potential to accelerate the growth of the business, terminating a client relationship that loses money, and many such issues don't need more information, more 'how to,' but are already known actions that should be done. Is it because there is a want for perfection rather than the need, the must, for success? The lack of 'getting started' is usually driven by uncertainty of outcome, by some form of anxiety about the results, by some form of fear of failure that could occur from the action - a "let's learn more about it first before getting started" mentality. If you are growing, if you are trying new things, you will make mistakes and you will have failures. It is a matter of using excitement rather than fear as a must and not a want. Excitement about what you are doing will be a positive spin whereas fear will have a negative spin. The way we choose to deal with fear determines the very life that we are currently leading. What we have is based on moment-to-moment choices of what we do. In each of these moments we choose whether to get started or whether to learn more. We either take a risk and move towards what we desire as a result, or we play it safe and choose comfort by learning more. In the end, we either have experiences or we have excuses, we either have results or we have reasons, we either have brilliance or we have 'buts,' we either have what we want or we have a detailed list of the reasons why not. Fear and anxiety around failure as a reason for not getting started needs to be turned into a positive activity. At the end of his career, Michael Jordan said that he missed nearly 10,000 shots, lost over 3,000 games, and missed making the decisive shot dozens of times. "I've failed over and over in my life ... and that's why I succeeded." As the Nike slogan says, "Just Do It." Iain Macfarlane is the president and founder of BizCOACHING & Associates in Madison, a franchise of Action International. He was named "Coach of the Year 2005." iainmacfarlane@action-international.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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