When it comes to following through, believe it or not, I generally do practice what I preach. That’s why this month’s blog post will be especially short.
You see, in the midst of a big move, I’m super busy and quite stressed-out, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t feel in the least bit like writing the blog post I promised myself I’d write every month.
Although you may be reluctant to use it, you should know that you have access at any time to a cleverly hidden source of virtually unlimited follow through power.
You can access this powerhouse simply by deliberately creating a truly compelling reason to do — and keep on doing — whatever you intend to do NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE DOING IT.
I confessed in a previous post that although I’m proud of the follow through strategies I’ve developed over the years that enable people who use them to consistently make good on their own good intentions, I’m aware — painfully aware — that these strategies won’t do much good for people who don’t actually use them. And I’m also painfully aware that not everyone who learns them will use them.
If you’ve completed the Follow Through Strategies course, you already know about the Leading the Horse to Water strategy. That strategy calls for removing the unpleasant part of a task you need to complete – scaling it back as much as it takes to detoxify it so you can move forward and build the momentum and structure necessary to eventually get the whole job done. In other words, it’s a matter of lowering the bar so that you can easily clear it.
It’s impossible to talk about following through without acknowledging the elephant in the room. I mean no offense by this, but the elephant in the room is YOU!
That’s right, you’re the elephant. And you’re also the elephant trainer.
Procrastination is waiting until the last minute to do something you know you should do but sure as heck don’t feel like doing. We all procrastinate. Some people are lucky enough, however, to reach the last minute right away. For others, it can take forever for the last minute to come. This article offers a counterintuitive way to end procrastination, by making the last minute come sooner.
It’s unfortunate that when what we’ve intelligently decided we should do is at odds with what we FEEL like doing, what we FEEL like doing often wins.
I think you’re going to be surprised by this: I can make a serious case for just throwing up your hands and formally giving up on following through.
The Intention Vault was designed to be a place where you can formally register and securely store the intentions you’ve decided to adopt.
I’ve been accused before of having a cynical view of the way the human mind works. That’s because I flatly reject the widely accepted notion that the human mind is a perfectly designed achievement machine.