4. progress: means moving forward with your dreams and pursuing your path. This is the actual journey, getting there and all the work that needs to be done along the way. Principles: slight edge, consistent efforts, staying the course, keeping focused, being loyal to your dreams, setting goals, planning, being committed, staying focused, maintaining motivation, and managing yourself, your energy, your stress, and your resources
Hi, my name is Ben Balden. My life’s mission is to help everyone live a happier, fuller life. My intention for creating this information here is to realize my vision of a world full of happy and successful people at peace with themselves and in harmony with others. I warmly invite you to join me in this passionate cause: to help all people everywhere live a happier, fuller life. Let’s start with ourselves.
The Main Idea
You know where you are going having clarified your purpose and vision, now how do you get there.
This is about moving ahead. This is where all the work is done. This is where you complete both the mundane tasks and the masterful tasks. And where all the growing and seemingly insignificant progress compounded over time to create huge overwhelming results happens. It’s all about getting there.
Intention alone is not enough, you must apply the principles of growth.
EXPECTED TIME FOR COMPLETION: 1 hr 15 min
What We Will Cover
It is vital that some growth principles must be applied to move your life from conception to realization. Each of these caters to the human condition, strengths, and weaknesses, and each of these is how everything important gets done in the world.
- Commitment
- Action
- Focus
- Following success
- Management
Commitment
Commitment is about placing faith in your decision and exercising that faith by eliminating other options (at least for the time being). It’s both about being dedicated and also about restricting yourself for a future result.
What is Commitment?
com·mit·ment /kəˈmitmənt/
noun 1. the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc.
noun 2. an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action.
It’s about identifying the target and deciding upon it. It’s also about nailing the target down, so you don’t have a moving target. It’s an intention to “Stick With It.” In essence, it’s about burning your bridges to ensure you focus on one option.
Commitment and Your Vision and Purpose
So, how does commitment help you move forward with your purpose and vision?
- Promise – Commitment is a promise you make to yourself to apply yourself, your efforts, your reputation, and your full heart to taking an idea to completion. It’s doing what you said you would do.
- Stick-with-it-ness – Commitment is about sticking with it when times get hard when the price seems to go up, when it looks like a losing cause. Commitment means a promise to pay the necessary price.
- Resources – Commitment allocates your resources today, tomorrow, and for many other days after that to the completion and realization of the target result. Big results take big investments. But big investments may have many many parts over time.
- Exclusivity – Commitment means concentrating on a single or a few tasks to more effectively drive it to completion. This means avoiding distractions and drains of resources, effort, and time. This means NOT doing other things.
Establishing Priorities
Being committed to your vision or purpose is crucial because achieving your vision requires resources, time, effort, focus, and … you. Without commitment, when something else comes along, you will abandon your decision to chase after another idea. Without commitment, as resources come in, you will allocate them off to other distractions that catch your interest.
You commitment dictates your solid priorities. Other distractions and interests may also be noble and good, but without commitment, you have an ever-shifting hierarchy of priorities that allows anything to take center stage and rob the chances of cultivating a single champion. Establishing a commitment is about what is MORE important in your life. This is your priority.
Making that decision of what’s important in your life is key. However, making that decision over and over is madness and will lead to frustration and wasted time and effort. You need to decide once & stand by your decision. Immovable.
What if there is a change?
“What if?” you say? What if some new information comes along? A new opportunity? A proverbial fork-in-the-road? How can you take advantage of opportunities if you are so inflexible that you won’t change? The answer lies within the question.
If you are too quick to adopt new opportunities, those new opportunities will soon be quickly replaced. The next opportunity will come along and displace the new opportunity. And thus NO OPPORTUNITY will be allowed the time to grow to fruition. And you will enjoy no real results except the fancies that you experience in your mind with every new idea that comes along.
Here are some ideas to balance between commitment and flexibility
- Allow Evolution – Allow your vision to evolve, to grow, and to extend. This not only allows you to stay committed to the same vision but also allows the vision to take advantage of opportunities in harmony with your ultimate vision and purpose.
- Hesitate to abandon – Abandonment of your commitment is a crime against you. You lose trust and credibility with the person most important in your life: you. If you promise yourself, stick to the promise. There may be situations that dictate that you let go of a bad idea. Hesitate first. Seek guidance from others. Seek permission from yourself.
- Weigh the options – “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” If you have already embarked on a journey, you are further along than a new opportunity. Take this into account. Don’t just judge the value of the new opportunity alone. Weigh it against what you have already committed to.
Overcommitting
Overcommitting is another form of breaking your commitment. Remember committing follows from making a decision, which means cutting off other options. Thus when you commit to something, you cannot then honestly commit those same resources, time, and effort when you have already promised those resources to others. Essentially, when you commit to something there is an element of exclusivity. If you then commit those same resources to something else, you break that promise to the previous commitment.
Some commitments are not exactly exclusive, but taking on too many commitments that feed off of the same resources disables your capacity to fulfill all of your commitments. You take a risk of leaving your commitments unfulfilled when you take on more, dilute your focus, and drain your resources.
Action
Action is required to make anything happen.
What is Action?
Action is the process of bringing an idea into the world. Your idea alone is not enough. Your intention alone is not enough. You must initiate action in the physical world to bring life to the concepts you create in your mind. You have the power to create your future by first imagining it in your mind and then taking the actions that will cause it to come to exist physically. Planning, thinking, dreaming, and visualizing will never lead to results in the physical world without taking action.
ac·tion /ˈakSH(ə)n/
noun 1. the fact or process of doing something, typically to achieve an aim.
Action is doing something. It’s moving your muscles, taking a series of small steps to cause something to happen. It’s writing something down. It’s making a phone call. It’s walking to the door. Whatever your aim or goal is, it can be broken down to a series of small steps usually requiring you to move your muscles.
How to act?
It may seem unnecessary to talk about how to act because it’s so simple, right? However, simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. So, let’s discuss some ideas to make it easier:
- Lean into it – Identify the first step no matter how small. Sometimes even thinking about it begins the process of taking the step. If necessary prepare your mind and imagine taking the step. For now, don’t worry about anything else except taking the smallest littlest step forward. When that’s done, you can worry about the next step.
- Count down – Count down from ten and when you get to zero, leap. This helps to alleviate overthinking or irrational fears by just confronting the fears and forgoing the superfluous thinking.
- Mob mentality – If you have a friend who also needs to take similar action, you can take advantage of the historically known force of mob mentality. It’s easier to do things as a group because, well … support, encouragement, and diffused responsibility.
- Take Courage – Easy to say, but how do you do it? Courage is born of confidence, bravery, and faith. Confidence comes from remembering past victories. Bravery comes from revisiting your values. Faith comes from believing in a higher power and that what you are doing is right.
Why people don’t act?
There are basically two reasons that anyone would fail to act:
- Fear – Some people don’t act because they are afraid of either failure or success and the consequences that come from them. The consequences might be too weighty or embarrassing to bear. The antidote to fear is faith that you will succeed and you will both deserve and enjoy that success.
- Faith – Faith, or lack thereof, is another reason why people don’t even try. You won’t attempt to do something when you believe that it will not produce the desired result. You don’t have faith in the action. This is good when the proposed action is false like intimidating people to be your friend. But this is bad when the proposed action is actually based in truth like opening up to people and being kind to them to win their friendship. Thus the antidote to faith (or lack of faith) is the truth.
Directed Activity
Living with purpose means taking directed intentional action to achieve an aim. To be honest, we all take action every day in our lives. But there is a big difference between acting out of default and acting out of intention. Your action must be directed, and your vision and your purpose inform those directions.
- Decision making – When it comes time to make a decision, look back on the decisions you have already made: your commitments, your vision, and your purpose. Weigh your decision against those standards to determine whether your action will bring about your desired result.
- Intention-based – Make sure you act with intention. As you are acting, think of the final result you want to bring into being.
- Learn, do, review – Act on what you have learned, carry out the action according to your best abilities under the circumstances, and remember to review the results to learn from them. Repeat.
Focus
Part of moving forward with your vision and purpose is keeping your eye on them. This means maintaining focus.
fo·cus/ˈfōkəs/
noun 1. an act of concentrating interest or activity on something.
Focus is so important, many high achieving individuals credit the single idea of “focus” as the key to their success. Among these are Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zukerberg.1
“In 1991 when Bill Gates’s father asked his son, Bill, and Warren Buffet what the most important factor for success was, they both gave the same answer: ‘focus.’ “2
“Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.”-Warren Buffett
“He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business – art, literature, science, travel, architecture – so that he could focus on his passion.”
– Alice Schroeder, a Warren Buffett biographer“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”
– Steve Jobs, Apple CEO & cofounder“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”
– Steve Jobs, CEO & cofounder of Apple
Focusing on your vision or purpose means
- Saying No – Focus is about saying no to all the other good ideas out there, so you can work on the idea in front of you.
- Return – Staying focused means vigilantly returning to base, reminding yourself of your desired result, reiterating to yourself your vision. Coming back to the same focus over and over. Being persistent with your efforts and your energy.
- Tracking – One interesting thing about human behavior is what you track or measure gets your focus and keeps you on track. So set up a tracking system to keep track of your efforts and tasks that will see you through to your goal.
- Step-by-step – Take one step at a time. Focus on issues singularly. These steps add up. At the same time, always keep your eye on the ball. Sometimes being 100% vigilant is easier than being 99% because the latter requires making a decision: should you or shouldn’t you. You must continually take the seemingly insignificant steps that lead up to significant results. They compound…
- Compound Effect – Moving toward your goal is a gradual process — especially for big goals. It is about continually adding value to the vision and consistently working on it. Each little effort of itself doesn’t seem much, but added over time can be so significant.
Following success
Ok. Taking action is cool and everything. But, what actions should I take? What if I don’t know what to do?
- Success Leaves Clues – Find someone who is successful in the field you want to go in. See how they do it. Observe them. If possible, ask them. You must understand what you are getting into, what the terms are, what the cost will be, and be willing to pay the price.
- Ask, Talk, Seek – Asking is one of the best ways to find out. Talk to people who know (avoid the ones who guess), seek answers from a myriad of sources: people, books, training, and personal experience…
- Try: Learn From Experience – Just beginning and learning from your experience can be the most valuable knowledge you can gain. If you have nothing to lose, just jump in and give it a go.
- Seek Feedback – Always, seek feedback from two groups of people: (1) those you serve like your clients and (2) those you emulate like your mentors
- Associates – Associating with friends who are positive, optimistic, supportive and have the mindset you need is a great way to get into success.
- Knowledge & Skill – In any field or undertaking, there is a certain level of knowledge and skill you need to be successful. Find out what it is and acquire it bit by bit.
Management
Finally, part of moving forward is maintaining and improving your most important asset: you. This means management. Management or self-management is key to progression and moving forward. The better you are at managing yourself and your life, the more effective you will be at making progress toward your intended goals.
- Personal Development – Personal development is about making sure you are growing and improving, your skills, your knowledge, your beliefs, your capacity for greatness
- Organization – Keeping your life organized both physically as well as mentally is very important to personal management. The more things are organized, the less brain-space they consume and the abler you are to make progress in the more important areas of life.
- Time Allocation – If you are your greatest asset, access to you is measured in time. You need to be able to allocate your time wisely: eliminate unnecessary tasks, batch mundane tasks together for effectiveness, and delegate tasks when it makes sense.
- Finances – Keeping your finances in check can affect so many other areas of your life. Having a healthy financial situation enables you to do so much more.
- Stress – You must balance your stress levels, take care of your health, leave time for you, have fun, and make sure you enjoy life along the way. Part of that is consciously managing your stress levels to keep yourself healthy and happy.
- Energy – Save your energy for more important things. Little things like making decisions take energy, so reducing the number of inconsequential decisions in your life will increase your overall available energy.3
- Goal Setting – Setting goals is so important. Goals help break bigger tasks down and make your big vision more manageable.
Time Management
Your life is measured in time. You split that time up into little bits, and every time you spend an hour to do something, you are spending some part of your life. You can’t really manage time, you can only manage yourself and what you do with your time.
I wrote a post where I collected all the time management concepts into one place: Time Management Concepts. Here is a brief summary:
- Time Allocation Principles
- Plan – allocate with purpose. We all have 24 hours a day. How we spend our time is just about allocating that resource to certain areas of life.
- Time Blocking – block out sections of time in your week where you specifically focus on things that matter to you.
- Power hour – set aside special time to be free of distractions and get the job done quickly.
- Weekly Plan/Review – make a plan. Using the week is usually the best. Review and repeat for the next week.
- Purpose – of course, it helps with your planning if you know what you want to accomplish. Getting clear here, you can focus on what you want and get rid of what you don’t.
- Tools (notes, checklists, calendars) – use tools like paper, pen, and programs to help you think, track, and time your tasks, appointments, and responsibilities.
- Plan – allocate with purpose. We all have 24 hours a day. How we spend our time is just about allocating that resource to certain areas of life.
- Increase Time Resources
- Increase Productivity – do more in less time and have time left over to re-allocate
- Do Less & Accomplish More – be clear on what you want and focus on just those things. See information on the 80-20% rule. 80% of your time should be spent on the 20% most productive area.
- Eliminate the unproductive and unimportant – Track your productivity and you may find there are some things you think are important that are getting you to the goal, but they really aren’t and if you eliminate them,
- Boundaries – learn to say, “no” to others taking your time and learn to honor your own time by sticking to your schedule
- Outsourcing – get together with others. You might be able to find someone else to do the tasks that you are not entirely good at. You can delegate and recruit others to your cause.
Financial Management
Financial management is so very important because it affects so many other parts of your life. It’s all about your possessions or those things you have stewardship and how you manage what you own and build your wealth, or increase your influence over physical possessions. There is a great book on this subject called The 4 Laws of Financial Prosperity by Blaine Harris – (See my review and notes). It basically simplifies the basic principles of financial management in four areas.
Being financially stable doesn’t mean you have to earn a lot of money. Rather it’s all about what you do with the resources you receive.
- Track – Track, in simple terms, means writing down every monetary transaction. The purpose of tracking everything is to give you insight into your financial situation.
- Target – Target means to set some goals. The main idea is to have something to work forward to, the most important of which is building your net worth.
- Trim – Trim can be simplified by saying live on less to benefit from surplus. It also means to pay yourself first. It’s not about not spending. It’s about spending differently.
- Train – Train means keep learning, asking questions, reading books, and investing your money, so that it will work for you – rather than you work for it.
The 4 Laws of Financial Prosperity by Blaine Harris – See my review and notes: https://benbalden.com/4-laws-financial-prosperity/
Goal Setting
Goals are signposts along a long road. They help you see that you are making progress. They also help you work on the day-to-day issues while keeping your focus on the far-away vision. The first part of setting goals is to begin with the end in mind, your vision, or the final result you are working toward, and break it down.
Chunk it down
Break your big vision (or goal) into smaller more manageable parts. You can do this by asking yourself, “What needs to happen for this to come to pass?” or, “What must happen before that?” and, “What can I do to cause that to happen?” While it may not seem that you have the power to complete everything that needs to be done to bring your goal to realization, there is always something that you can do to influence it forward. The, “What can I do…” question will keep you focused on devising tasks within your power to bring about your big goal. Keep asking questions until you get manageable parts of the goal. You can also break these tasks down into groups or categories such as topic areas or time periods like daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and 5-yearly goals with both significant and simple guideposts.
Functional Goals
Make sure your goals are functional. A functional goal needs clear parameters: quantity, time, quality, and specificity. A good standard to measure your goal by to make sure it is a functional goal is the S.M.A.R.T. goal acronym. Many people are familiar with it. Here’s how it works. Each letter in the word, “smart” represents a quality you must have in your goal:
- S. – Specific – Your goal must be very specific with numbers, dates, and very descriptive language to make it very clear what the goal is about. Never leave it at just equal. Make sure you name it as more than or less than. For instance, achieve more than 100 customers is better than exactly 100 customers.
- M. – Measurable – You must be able to measure your goal so that you will know exactly when you have reached the goal or not. Be objective and leave out the subjective or vague language.
- A. – Attainable – Your goal must be obtainable. It must be a goal for you to achieve, not a goal for someone else. A good way to measure this is to ask yourself if there are things you can do to achieve this goal without the cooperation of others. Your goal must also be Realistic. This means that you believe that you can achieve this goal. Not whether it is possible at all or not but is it more likely than not if you apply yourself based on your past history and current capability. That is to say, do not set a goal for a super-human you that relies on a miraculous intervention from Heaven. That’s a wish not a goal.
- R. – Relevant – Your goal, if achieved, must move your closer to your life’s mission and vision. If the goal is not relevant toward that end, forget it. Don’t set out to achieve something that ultimately distracts you from your true purpose and vision for your life.
- T. – Time-Bound – Any functional goal must have a timeline or a deadline. In the same spirit that a goal must have a targeted, measurable result, it must deliver that result by a certain time. This is such an important parameter, that without a time deadline, your goal is merely a pipe-dream to be completed somewhere in the future if ever. It doesn’t need to be precise, but it should be URGENT and command PRIORITY.
Conclusion / Recap
Remember, the whole idea here is about getting to your destination. It’s that crucial part in your journey when you put footstep after footstep. This takes determination and commitment to not fall into other paths. It takes using your muscles to bring one foot in front of another. It takes a great deal of focus to say no to temptations of other good destinations. It takes skills and managing your life, so that you make progress every day. It is in these efforts that your true growth is realized and all those thousands of seemingly insignificant steps compound together to miraculously transform and transport you to the destination you envisioned from day one.
Application in Your Life
Now, it’s your turn to take this knowledge and internalize it by putting it into practice today. Let’s make some movement. None of this will make sense if you have not already drawn out your dreams, or captured your life’s vision. So, if you have not, you will need to go back and do that first. If you have, carry on… You have five simple challenges to get the ball rolling today:
- Make a commitment – promise yourself in front of a witness (think “loved-one” in your life) that you will remain true to the vision you decided on. Remember this vision can evolve, but you must not ever abandon it unless there is no way forward.
- Take an action – Identify one thing you can do to move forward with your vision. It doesn’t matter how insignificant, but it must be in addition to the action you took yesterday.
- Focus – Name one thing you will say, “No” to in order to focus on your vision.
- Follow Success – Search out and find one source of information from a successful origin that will help you on your journey. For today, you are just identifying it or taking one step toward it.
- Management – Decide one thing that will improve your life and your effectiveness. Make a plan to improve in that area. Now, imagine yourself carrying out that plan.
The Oil Advantage
Essential oils can help unlock your mind, get your moving, and bring courage and conviction in times of doubt and hesitation. They can help give you the extra boost to get you where you want to go. Here are some blends to try.
About The ACTION Blend
The purpose of this blend is to inspire action. It is intended to help people find the courage to get over mental boundaries and act on their dreams. Acting is the crucial, and often missing, element in driving forward to your dreams.
Learn How To Make The ACTION Blend Here
About The Manifest Blend
This blend is designed to not only help you see clearly your vision but move that vision to reality. Manifesting is about combining your will, your conscious mind, and your actions to produce your desired and intended result in the physical world.
Learn How To Make The MANIFEST Blend Here
I only use doTERRA essential oils. The best way to buy doTERRA oils is through a wholesale account where you can save 50%-80% when you buy.
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Thank You
Thank you for joining me on this Personal Development journey.
Books Mentioned In This Post
Steve Jobs Hardcover by Walter Isaacson
Buy “Steve Jobs” Here
The 4 Laws of Financial Prosperity by Blaine Harris – (See my review and notes)
Buy “The 4 Laws of Financial Prosperity” Here
Footnotes and References
- Article “According to Bill Gates & Warren Buffett, You Need This Trait” Finance Buzz https://financebuzz.com/investing-millionaires-warren-buffett-stocks
- Article “According to Bill Gates & Warren Buffett, You Need This Trait” Finance Buzz https://financebuzz.com/investing-millionaires-warren-buffett-stocks
- “The downside of this decision fatigue is two-fold: when we get tired of making decisions, we either (1) start avoiding making decisions and (2) worse we don’t make the right decisions. But high-achievers selectively choose to avoid decisions, which are not worthy of their precious time. Former President Barack Obama was once asked generally about how he makes decisions. He said, ‘You’ll see, I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make.’ Also, look at Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg — they all wore pretty much the same outfits every day giving themselves one less decision to think about.” See source here.
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