How to take action and follow through

Have you ever had moments in your life where you have so many ideas, plans, goals and dreams that you’re frozen? Overwhelm is an understatement ?

You know that you must move forward but somehow it feels like your feet are in quick sand and slowly but surely you feel that you are sinking, your hand is reaching out for help but it’s as though no one can hear you, they are way too busy getting on with their own lives.

How do we control the over thinking and keep ourselves motivated enough to keep moving, to keep reaching for those goals to follow through even when we feel stuck? How do we even know where to start never mind keep moving?

For me the answer is journaling, but even that seems to throw up it‘s own obstacles. Where do we start? How do we do that and how often? The answer always seems to come back to, do what feels right for you, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but that is not a helpful answer especially if you are new to journalling. So where do we start?

THE BEGINNING

We start at the beginning of course. The first question to ask yourself is what are you trying to achieve? For most of us we are trying to create change in one or many areas of our lives, so lets start there.

What exactly do you want to change? There are many areas of our lives we want to change or at least focus on, so lets take five minutes to list out our main areas.

Happy with your list? If you’re like me your list is long and detailed, if that is the case try to correlate the list , make some sub categories, five more minutes should achieve that.

It would be impossible to suggest that you can resolve all of these areas today or even this year, for me I choose 3 areas to focus on, they become my targets for the year. I don’t call them goals or resolutions because in my experience I never complete them when I do that so I call them targets.

For each target I make an action plan, my action plan is a step by step guide of how I hit the target. Targets can be long term or short term but either way I have a step by step plan of how to get there.

Once we have an action plan in place I create a journal strategy page.

My strategy page is a reflective template. I complete it at the end of my day, it’s my personal accountability partner.

I document my wins, my challenges and my targets for the next day. If you’d like a copy of my template please let me know in the comments below.

My wins = steps/ ideas/ decisions that I have taken to take me closer to my main target - needle movers if you like.

My Challenges = Barriers/ road blocks, situations that have prevented me moving forward towards my main goal.

My new Target= My next steps towards my bulls eye.

My strategy journal keeps me motivated especially on those days when I feel like I want to give up, those days when It feels like I’m procrastinating, hiding from my self, when self sabotaging thoughts are bearing down on me and overwhelm is setting in.

Looking back over my previous barriers and how I overcame them helps to keep me motivated, reminds me that it is my own will that keeps me focused and moving forward.

If we take just one hour per day and assign it to grow or to focus on one step of our current target it will be amazing how far we can come.

xx. Lei

KEEP YOUR NEYES ON THE STARS AND YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND.