There are so many layers to this, and I’ll map out today a few key things to consider when wondering how to ‘just do it’. Let’s start tiny and work our way up to bigger. This is something I work with students on with Private Mentoring, so if you need a hand, reach out for a session.
Something I do daily and weekly is a tool I teach around Big Rocks, Pebbles and Sand. The exercise in its entirety is too long to include here, but essentially every day you decide that if only two things could get done the entire day (yes, just two) and the whole day went to hell in a handbasket, at least you got these done. These are your two Big Rocks. They must be attended to before anything else. They are not scheduled meetings or things you already have in your Calendar. It’s the budget your avoiding, your meditation practice that you keep skipping, doing your receipts for your bookkeeper, the proposal that is looming or firing that client or calling back that person for that awkward phone call. We always put these things last and they create anxiety. Over the years I have become very disciplined in getting the Big Rocks prioritised! The relief and pride when you tackle the most important but easily procrastinated is an insanely delicious sense of flow to everything else after that! I also have Big Rocks of the week, these are things like ‘finish book proposal’ or ‘go live with Retreat’, they are big and take time and if I let them will slide and build me into a slow panic.
The bigger things are ‘I wish I could be fit’ – start exercising today. ‘I wish I could fit in my meditation practice’ – get your priorities organised around it and look at what else you’re doing that takes up that time. If it’s Netflix or social media, then take a look. I love it when people say ‘I seriously don’t have time’, and we take a deeper look into how much time they spend a week on apps, social media, reading gossip mags etc. There is nothing wrong with these things at all, but if they are obstructing the path to our higher selves and what we want to be doing, taking a clear look at this is remarkably insightful.
Motivation doesn’t work for long. Habit does. Craig Harper says this all the time as one of his key messages. He explained to me, ‘people don’t need inspiration to clean their teeth, they don’t agonise about starting Monday or waiting until they have lost a few kilos to start brushing their teeth, they just do it, because it’s a habit’. The point being if you want your meditation practice or whatever it is to be daily, you have to be disciplined until you don’t even think about it and it’s just part of you who you are and what you do. And this won’t happen on day one.
On the weekend after much ground work with Jeff Kober we asked if you could achieve something in 2018 with a leave pass of failure, so you were Willy Wonka style guaranteed to succeed, what would you do. You CANNOT fail, it’s going to be incredible and no one will laugh at you…
Then we workshopped what things were stopping everyone. The key message being, you deserve a high grade life and if you’re going to live a creative, inspired, fulfilled life, you are just going to have to DO IT, starting now. Not later.
Sent with love,
Jac x