It’s been too long. My bad 🙁 But on that note… Do you ever feel like you’ve gotten off-track? [PLEASE tell me it’s not just me who feels that way…]
Yes, successful people get off-track, too.
The goal isn’t to never get off-track.
The goal is to be able to recognize it and get back on-track really fast.
I was feeling off-track recently–not feeling engaged with my goals, not feeling excited or especially motivated. And to me, that is the MOST IRRITATING thing!
Why? because as an entrepreneur, I’m the one chooses my goals, sets a vision and plans how my time will be spent. And if it’s ME who sets all that, why I am setting it in a way that is not resonating with me!?
Why am I allowing my business to be out of alignment with who I really am?! Super frustrating. So about 10 days ago, I finally decided I needed to do something about this feeling of being off-track. And I wanted to share with you how I went about doing this, because you may be able to apply this in your world too.
Step 1: The FIRST step is actually the thing that I believe is the key to this whole process:
First, I made a list of all the questions I needed to ask myself, in every category of my life.
This was a long list
–I wrote out two full pages of handwritten questions in a large notebook. It was a lot of questions I needed to get clarity on.
For example, a couple of them were:
- What are the aspects of real estate that I still feel really thirsty to learn about?
- I’m not feeling like a success at this moment–what are the criteria I’m currently scoring myself on, that I’m giving low scores for?
- If I were being completely unapologetic and not worrying about conforming to anyone else’s expectations, what would my ideal day look like?
My list of questions went on, and on, and on until I felt like I had drained my brain of any questions that had been swimming through my mind
–consciously and subconsciously both.
Step 2: The next step was to take each question one at a time, and answer it with one goal in mind:
BRUTAL HONESTY. As I answered the questions, I had to ask myself, “is this how I REALLY feel, or is this how I think I SHOULD feel?” For instance, when I reviewed one of my goals, once I got super honest with myself, I realized that goal didn’t really resonate with me; rather, it was something I felt I should want to achieve…not something I really did want to achieve.
This step results in a list of what I call “Harsh Truths to Accept.” I’ll share one of the ones that I realized from this process:
I need an “opponent”–if I don’t have somebody, or something, I’m playing against, and trying to WIN, I don’t feel engaged. This whole process of answering these questions took me DAYS–like, the better part of an entire week, to answer. But wow, was it therapeutic and helpful.
Step 3: The final step happened after I finished answering all the questions. I stepped away for a couple days and let my mind rest a bit. Then I came back to my answers with a highlighter and started identifying the key concepts, common threads and main insights. Then, category by category, I made a list of those key ideas as a summary of what I had uncovered within myself.
Taking Action on the Insights From this exercise, I had a list of many key ideas, personal insights about myself, and key bullet points from having an honest conversation with myself.
The benefits were huge:
–I IMMEDIATELY felt so much more on-track–I felt more connected to my goals and visions–many of which I had reframed and articulated differently
–I felt a newfound commitment to organizing my life and business around who I really am, to unleash my greatest capabilities.
So if you are feeling off-track at all, don’t feel bad about that. Getting off-track is not a failure. What matters is that you get back ON TRACK as fast as possible. I suggest you use this process
–it’s a powerful framework for identifying all the things that are bugging you, pulling them apart to evaluate each one individually, and then creating a sense of clarity for each one.
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