Achieving Success One Action at a Time
Do you feel like you’re constantly hustling to achieve success in your business? Our society tends to define worth by how many hours you’re working. Reaching your dream has to be hard in order to be considered successful. If you aren’t exhausting yourself and wearing yourself thin, then you must not be working hard enough. Or you must not want it bad enough! However, achieving success doesn’t happen when you’re hustling and exhausting yourself. Success is achieved one small action at a time!
Achieving success happens in your daily actions not in your big visions. If you’re feeling stuck or discontent in your business, it’s time to re-evaluate how you’re planning out your goals. Today, we’re going to be discussing changing your actions to reflect a more intentional lifestyle. Forget hustling and getting burnt out.
Choose to Take Action
First, you may find that instead of hustling and grinding you’re not even there yet. You may be on the other side of the spectrum, full of self-doubt and so overwhelmed with where to begin that you never start. Success starts with taking action, so it’s better to do it scared than not to do anything at all. It’s also better to start with something (heck anything!) then to be so overwhelmed by everything that you do nothing. The biggest factor is: YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! You can’t just talk about achieving success and reaching your potential without action. You have to get out of your head, and just do something! Anything!
Start By Dreaming Backwards
Next, instead of thinking about where you want to be in the far future and stopping there, let’s start dreaming backwards. What do you hope to accomplish in five years? What about three years? What will you consider successful in 3-5 years? Find that dream and put it on your vision board.
Then, once you discover that potential, start thinking more practical. Where do you want to be in a year? What does that dream look like? Start envisioning it. What it would feel like to reach that goal and be in that place? Now that you’ve made your long term goals more practical by working backwards, let’s take it even further.
Where do you want to be in 3-6 months? What do you hope to achieve within this time frame? THIS is where achieving success happens one day at a time. When you work backwards, you can take long term goals, and then find the connecting path that brings you to your reality NOW! It connects where you are and where you want to be. When you work backwards, you’re creating a clear path to follow! If you set aside time each day to get closer to your 3 month goals, you’ll find in 3 months you’re exactly where you thought you’d be.
Achieving success doesn’t happen by wearing yourself thin. It doesn’t happen by losing focus because you’re exhausted. And it is definitely not achieved by getting discouraged because success seems unnatainable. Start thinking long term! Then, hone in on your short term goals so you can see the direction you’re moving towards!
Set Small Daily Actions
Now that you’ve started dreaming backwards, it’s time to set small daily actions that will make an impact. While thinking long term is good, you may be getting overwhelmed with how to make those dreams a reality. You know where you want to be BUT you’re not sure about the daily actions that will get you there. You’re so overwhelmed with the bigger picture that you forget that how you spend your days actually matters A LOT!
Achieving success starts with one action every day. Find one or two small tasks that you can do every single day. Remember, the action doesn’t have to be big at all. It’s better to do something small than nothing at all!
Spend 20 minutes engaging on your socials. Design a few social graphics. Write that blog. Type that email. Just one or two small actions can make such an impact long term. If you do two small things every day, by the end of the week- you’ve accomplished 14 tasks on your to-do list. Over a course of a month, that is roughly 60 tasks that you’ve completed. Can you imagine how effective that will be for growing your business, reaching your goals, and becoming successful?!
If you find yourself procrastinating instead of hustling, this is for you as well! Instead of getting overwhelmed with everything you have to do, focus in on completing those one or two tasks a day. You’ll do it again and again and again…eventually it will become a habit for you!
Focus on the smallest steps you can take each day to get you moving in the right direction!
Scheduling Your Joy
During the hustle and bustle of growing your business, you may forget how important it is to have healthy boundaries. While reaching that goal in your business may bring you joy, you can’t beat yourself down in the process. It’s likely that if you burn yourself out, you won’t actually achieve your dream. You’ll give up from exhaustion. You’ll begin to feel like your dream isn’t attainable or achievable with your current lifestyle. You’ll believe you don’t have time to invest in your long term dreams. It’s not that you don’t have time. It’s the way your scheduling your time that isn’t working!
We each have the same 24 hours in a day. Some of the most successful people in the world have the same amount of time in their day as you and me. How we spend our 24 hours is important! You can choose to spend your 24 hours however you want. How you prioritize it though will be crucial to achieving success.
First, start with reframing your idea about procrastination. Your procrastination is most likely rooted in perfection. You’ve heard us say it before, but failure is inevitable. It is better to do something than nothing. Use your failures as data to know what to change moving forward.
Second, schedule your joy and then create your priorities AROUND your joy. Scheduling your joy is A PART of your business. Find the things in your life that bring you joy and don’t toss them out while you’re growing your business. The things that bring you joy are the things that lift your spirits, boost your creative juices, and give you confidence. All of those things are beneficial to your well-being but also growing a business.
One Bite at a Time
Achieving success starts one bite at a time! One action at a time. One day at a time. Stop procrastinating because you’re so overwhelmed with where to begin. Stop hustling so hard that you’ll eventually wear out and give up. Starting and growing a business is a journey. It’s a marathon not a sprint! You have to find something that is practical for you, your business, and your lifestyle long term.
And don’t forget to have fun a long the way. Schedule your joy! Find what makes you happy and make it a priority. Schedule your life around your joy! It pays to schedule joy!
Want to learn more about goal setting, scheduling your joy, and daily actions?
Be sure to check out this week’s podcast with guest host Tanya Dalton, Episode 137: Hustling Isn’t The Answer For Your Business.
If you’d like to hear more about scheduling your joy and being a healthy CEO, read our blog- 4 Tips to Vacation as a #Healthy CEO
We hope you found this week’s blog post helpful and insightful! If so, we’d love for you to share this infographic with your community to start the conversation about taking action!
