You’re convinced that something must change, whether in your work or personal life. But you are struggling to figure it out.
Sometimes an area of your life — or perhaps more than one — has gone completely off track and you feel like you can’t move forward.
The power of resetting is that at any given moment in life, you truly can reset yourself, career, or relationship.
You give yourself an entirely fresh start, a clean slate to begin your efforts anew; it completely clears your mind of all the unfinished to-dos, burdensome distractions, and nagging questions in life.
If predictable patterns in your life are not given you the results you seek, change course. Don’t do what you’ve always done.
Switch off the usual suspects and embrace a new challenge.
The golden opportunity to change is now.
Hit reset. Start over. Start a new chapter.
The essence of life is living it to the fullest.
Are you living a meaningful life right now?
A reset is your personal empowerment “button” — accessible anytime you desire change.
A reset allows you to make improvements in your daily life in any shape or form you choose, at a pace you can comfortably commit to.
Hitting the reset button is the only way to avoid hitting a permanent wall.
When life is audited, performance improves
You are probably due to a life audit.
Do some introspection.
What is the most interesting /important thing to you right now?
Are you working towards that?
Reexamine your goals in life as needed, and refocus where necessary.
Add a recurring weekly/monthly audit to your calendar, and start reflecting on your weekly actions.
Ask yourself these questions:
What went right? Wrong? What can I do better?
You don’t even have to spend an hour auditing yourself.
You can quickly assess how you performed each week or month, with questions like:
How is this helping me achieve my goals?
What am I gaining by having this on my to-do list? Could I achieve the same gains another way?
What would I lose by taking this off my list? Do those things play a large role in me achieving my long-term goal?
Did I consume more than I create?
How about my time management? How did my screen time affect my productivity?
If you are future-focused, this is a helpful reminder to look back, even for a few minutes, and think about how far you’ve come and what you need to do to be better, and smarter in the future.
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
It’s a better approach to redefine personal progress.
Auditing yourself can help you sustain a ruthless level of prioritization.
It’s a practical way to achieve meaningful progress.
Tracking improves everything.
Analysis of work and life brings ideas for progress.
Many people are held back because they simply don’t know how to improve.
They aren’t tracking their life enough!
The more you track, the more you know about your situation, your behavior, and your projected future.
You can even track bad behaviors, and habits.
An unhealthy behavior is something that, if unchecked, could possibly spiral out of control and negatively affect your life or derail your purpose and plans.
Do you feel stuck?
Alistair Smith once said,“Getting stuck is not a problem. Staying stuck is. Good learners practice getting unstuck,”
Many people want something better for their lives, but they don’t know where to start. Others have done amazing things in the past, they are struggling in the present to be awesome again.
The good news is, it’s just a feeling when you start to make positive movement forward, the feeling will change.
When you are stuck, Bruce Chant recommends that you ask yourself three important questions to re-calibrate and get moving in the right direction again.
Those three questions are:
What do you want? Name it. Define it. Call it out.
What is stopping you? A belief or mindset. Fear. An excuse.
What do you need to do to obtain it? Now you can work to address the issue but do so by starting small.
Accept the past and keep moving
Brian Tracy once said, “It doesn’t matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.”
Yes, you may not be happy about your past.
But remember, failure is not final or fatal.
It’s the willingness to keep moving that matters.
Bad memories will come back.
Instead of dwelling on them and relieving the situation, try to accept it, and focus on the future.
Hack away the unessential
Is there anything that takes up a lot of your time and energy but you don’t really enjoy doing it?
Sometimes you feel stuck because there are too many things that do not advance your long-term goals.
Create a short list of these things and eliminate them from your life ASAP.
You’ll feel much lighter and you’ll be able to concentrate on what’s really important. If you plan to start afresh it’s good to declutter your life completely.
Define new goals and purpose
When you lose your purpose, when you become stuck, you signal to your brain and body that you have no reason to live.
When you no longer challenge yourself mentally or physically, deterioration will set in. You start to decay.
Only by continually challenging yourself will you keep both your body and mind sharp.
In his book, What They Don’t Teach You in the Harvard Business School, author Mark McCormack tells a study about the students in the 1979 MBA program.
The graduate students were asked if they had set clear written goals for their future and made plans to accomplish them. 13% had goals but didn’t write them down. 3% had written them down. 84% had no goals.
10 years later, the graduates were interviewed again.
The 13% who had goals were earning an average of twice as much as the 84% who had no goals.
The 3% who had clearly defined and written their goals, were earning an average of 10 times their classmates.
Clearly, setting goals is powerful.
Plan your life out. Thinking about your future isn’t nearly as effective as writing down your goals.
You can only witness change and progress by defining a strong purpose for your life and working effortlessly to achieve it.
Without concrete, measurable, and achievable goals and a working system to help you reach your goals, your days lose their flavor and life becomes boring.
You’ve got to have excitement for the future to do something worthwhile with your life and career.
Change course, starting today
Changing course can be challenging, but what makes it exciting is the restoration of hope.
Give yourself a new and significant challenge.
To get that momentum back, give yourself something to pursue and find an accountability partner to help you take actionable steps.
Your pursuit should be meaningful to you.
Why you pursue something is equally as important as what you pursue. Start something greater than yourself. Something you truly believe in.
Just doing something different can boost your mood, change your perspective and give you a sense of optimism to move forward.
Pursue something that brings out the best in you. That way you will enjoy the journey and the process.
Move beyond mere talk and commit to specific actions that will move your goals forward.
Take the easiest step you can imagine to change course!
Once you start moving, you’ll feel unbelievably better.
You’ll feel the power of motion, you’ll feel the rut moving behind you. That one step — it’s all it takes to start moving and creating again.
You don’t have to be stuck.
You can choose to take action today to move forward, making progress towards your ultimate goal in life.
Know what you want, discern what’s stopping you, and take the next smallest step to get there.
Choose to make your life better, even when you are not stuck! If you want to make big changes, meaningful changes, don’t wait for a perfect day.
You have the power to hit the reset button on your life.
Don’t wait for the first of January every year.
Life has a reset button, but it’s up to you to push it Any. Time. You. Want.
It’s never too late for a do-over. Hit that reset button and never look back.
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Originally published on Medium
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