Is there something that you want to have happen in your career, organization, or life? What’s getting in your way? Of course, significant changes encounter many perceived and real obstacles. The critical question is what are you doing about them?
In his new book “Triggers,” Marshall Goldsmith highlights the big gap between planning and doing. He describes six “engaging questions” that he invites participants to ask themselves each day for ten working days. Each question begins with “Did I do my best to” and ends with “today?” While the content of the questions is important, what’s particularly powerful is the focus on what each of us (not someone else) did to do our best and did today (not sometime in the future).
Taking charge of what we want and taking action today yield success. This is core to our message in “Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life.” What will help you move from planning to action? Here are some of the 15 tools that have proven useful to accelerate through obstacles:
- Take 5 – spend 5 minutes at day giving focused attention to your hopes. [p. 64]
- Make your hopes visible—create images and reminders in your environment to keep your deepest hopes in mind.
- Have your very own Hope Holders—ask the right people to tend the flame of your inspiration and never let you give up on yourself.
- Get your “but” out of the way—examine how you think about things that get in your way. Remove what is interfering.
- Flip your concerns into hopes—explore your concerns to see what hope underlies them.
- Take the 100 Resource Challenge—discover the many underused resources that can help you succeed.
- Take consistent action with a Daily Action Pack—convert big objectives into bite-sized pieces that you can accomplish each day.
Pick the tools that will help you thrive.
Honor yourself with the questions and tools that put you in charge. When we shift our thinking from what’s in our way to what we can do today, our minds work to help us find a path.
Enjoy the results.
