Your business, and your life are perfectly situated, organized, and operated to achieve the results you are achieving today. In short, you are exactly where you have earned the right to be.
Don’t you hate that?
The self we imagine would have been a star in our chosen field. We would be healthy, financially secure, and have the perfect relationship. The self we see when we finally take an honest assessment is often quite different.
Every great business and every really successful individual value candor and honesty. They relentlessly tell themselves the truth about their strengths and weaknesses. And, they are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to leverage and threats to avoid based on a legitimate assessment of reality.
Nothing ever changes until we tell ourselves the truth. Here are five questions to start preparing today for different results tomorrow:
- What is your desired future, and is that in the realm of possibility? My desired future in high school was to either replace Ringo as the drummer for the Beatles or play Division I college basketball. Neither was going to happen. I was too slow to play Division I basketball, and the Beatles were not going to replace Ringo with a kid from a small town in Texas. It is fine to stretch and dream, but certain realities cannot be ignored.
- What are you really good at, and what do you suck at? The sooner you know the answer to this question, the sooner you can focus your energy on leveraging your strengths and shoring up your weaknesses.
- What is preventing you from achieving your results? Is there something you need to learn? Is it a matter of discipline and accountability? Most of us know what we need to do to deliver different results. We lack the discipline to do it. But, there are times when you do need to learn something new. Be honest about what is holding you back so that you can develop a plan to address it.
- What are you willing to give up to achieve the results you want? You will have to prioritize, and that means giving something up even if only on a temporary basis. Read what we said about this in a past Five Friends blog.
- How will you build and sustain the discipline to put your plans into action? The difference between occasional brilliance and consistent excellence is discipline. The old motivational speaker adage that you can think your way to success is a lie. You only achieve results when you combine focused thinking with consistent action and hard work.
It is never too late to begin. The past is an important teacher, but it is not the defining measurement of your ability to create a different future full of the results you want. But first, you have to tell yourself the truth.
