"While we waste our time hesitating and postponing, life is slipping away." - Seneca, Roman philosopher
Did you do your homework from yesterday? Did you write our your Isle of Desire for your August Adventure, in all its beautiful detail including the Feelings, Actions, and Results? Great!
Now, on to actually getting to there from where you are now.
Know What You're Up Against: The Mechanisms of Change, vs. The Flow of Daily Life
Creating limitless change successfully requires two things:
The willingness to take action to change, edit, replace, revise, recast some of the things you currently do in daily life.
The mechanism by which you repeat this change action over the course of multiple days, despite life's existing habits and pressures trying to push you back into your regular orbit, like the arrows pushing at the change-bubble in the image below. You repeat so that the thing you're repeating becomes your NEW NORMAL.
The Willingness to Replace Something With Something Better
To become limitless, you're going to have to let something else be replaced: a thought or belief that you're too old (or too young), some part of the mental energy eaten up by watching your favorite show, or activities you really enjoy, but that aren't part of THIS particular project and need to be de-prioritized so you can reach the next level. It takes willingness to prioritize your project over existing habits like this since it will feel out of your normal routine. It takes commitment to keep doing it across multiple days until it takes root.
The Mechanism For Repeating Change Until It Sticks
The most basic unit of change is this:
ACTION.
Nothing else matters, because nothing else creates results. You can have all the greatest ideas you want, or the most poignant, deeply expressive journal insights, but unless you manifest these yourself as changes to the ways you think, act, and live in the world, in and among and for others, they are merely nice thoughts.
Even if you're changing a belief in conjunction with your limitless project, it takes action energy to literally stop yourself and say, "No, this is my NEW belief." But in the end, tie it to a real-life action aspect to your daily new routine as well. How does changing the belief, change how you act within your environment?
Take your Isle of Desire and work out a few very basic, very small actions you can take, starting today. And tomorrow. And the day after that. Make the smallest unit of action you can take "OK", although it's all right to take bigger actions as well. But most of all, REPEAT your tune-in to your project daily. (Note that it doesn't have to be the same action every day, just that you do SOMETHING every day.)
Keep your actions...
Small and/or manageable in size (or something you can do a little bit more in each day).
Consistent, i.e. you do it every day and touch SOME aspect of your project every day, even if it's only for 5 minutes.
Action-based, i.e. representing action or knowledge in the real world that grows you in some way.
Rewarded, i.e. you reward yourself with your day's "project points" for even a 5-minute effort.
The reason you want to keep it small is that this keeps you able to do it DAILY. Sure, if you have more time, go for it - if your goal is to write a novel and you end up with a free hour to do it in, that's great. But for most people, finding and/or creating an hour every day is neither possible nor desirable as a consistently reachable level of effort. This is the mechanism by which you build change over time, and reroute the course of your life from its old habits into something new and better.
Dial into your project with daily, small, repeatable, consistent action.
It is the shortest distance between two points - between where you are now, and the Isle of Desire.
Homework: Take your logbook and write out some ideas for an action to take TODAY, and over the next few days. Be creative. Keep it fun and adventurous. Play with it. Even going to a new location, looking at it in the physical world (such as checking out a speaking venue), is a doable action that builds your knowledge in a real-world way.
Keep Growing,
Katherine
Katherine Lieber is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership, a company devoted to transformational change through self-leadership and a limitless mindset.
