Patrick Zeis In order to become successful, achieve your goals, and create your ideal life, you must first realize that action is the king of achievement. Our minds can become bogged down with a vast collection of personal and professional development tools, while we forget about the most important success-ensuring step: Taking Action. We must overcome our beliefs about failure and reframe the way we view rejection if we want to live a life filled with achievement.
The Tools of Achievement:
In the world of self-help psychology, there is an almost endless amount of strategies, exercises, and practices that can push you towards achievement in a more time-efficient manner. You can write vision statements, create incantations or anchors, practice visualization, and work on changing your limiting beliefs or conditioned behaviors. These achievement enhancers, and numerous others, are components that revolve around the simpler strategy of setting goals, gaining the needed skills and knowledge to succeed, and creating action plans to achieve the things you desire. For many people, however, these steps become tedious prerequisites that they believe must be done before actually acting upon their desired outcomes.
While the initial stages of goal achievement are important, it is vital to understand that the most important thing that you can do, in order to reach your goals, is to take definitive action. Action is and always will be the king of achievement.
What Stops Us from Taking Action:
There are a number of scenarios that consistently play out with success-seekers who are unable to take the definitive action needed to achieve. Sometimes individuals will get inspired, read a book about personal development, and work through numerous exercises but never actually put their feet to the pavement.
Other times, people become so driven to succeed but believe that they need a little bit more knowledge or understanding before they set out on the path towards success. In this scenario, individuals get stuck in a cycle of consuming different books and audio programs, while taking numerous personal or professional development courses, but never gain the confidence to act.
In both of these instances, regardless of if the goals are geared toward their health, career, relationships, or personal needs, these individuals fail to take the only step that can guarantee their success: Action. World-renowned personal development speaker and author Tony Robbins sums it up best when he says:
Knowledge does not equal power, Action equals power.”
And this is the one thing that you must realize as you set out to create your ideal life or achieve any particular goal.
Changing Our Beliefs about Failure & Rejection:
Now equipped with the knowledge of action’s importance, the question we must explore is “What stops individuals from taking action?” and the answer can be found by analyzing how individuals fail to overcome fear.
In the vast majority of instances, when an individual fails to take action, they can’t overcome their fear of failure and/or their fear of rejection. For this reason, in order to get ourselves to consistently act upon our desires, there are a number of things we must do, the first being to change our beliefs about failure and rejection. When you look at the legendary success stories of the past, present, and inevitably the future, you can find two common themes of individuals who have found success:
- They believed that not trying was more painful than ‘failing’ or ‘being rejected’.
- They all used their perceived failures as learning opportunities.
If you are going to reach your ultimate goals through hard work and calculated action, you have to get yourself to believe that it is more painful not to act than it is to act. The truth is that if you look back at the instances in your life when you let fear get the best of you, you will find memories that are more painful in comparison to the memories that you attempted to do something but ‘failed’. You have to completely understand that failing or being rejected is never as painful as the regret you have from not trying something.
To get ourselves to a place where we take the consistent action needed to achieve our goals, we have to change our beliefs about what failure is. Realizing that your past experiences of failure aren’t as painful as your past experiences of regret can help, but there is still more we can do. We must cultivate the belief that failure and rejection are nothing more than learning opportunities to help you succeed in the long run. You need to view, and use, every attempt at trying something as a learning opportunity. It is nothing more and nothing less. If you really sit down and think about what failure is, it is easy to find wonderful learning opportunities within each setback.
Action is The King of Achievement:
Another step that you can take when you are struggling to take action, is to use a short psychological exercise where you envision yourself on your deathbed. If you can’t find the resources within yourself to take action, you need to remember the reality of the situation you are in, the reality of death.
Ask your future self, as he or she lays on their deathbed, “Will I regret taking this chance?”, “Will I regret putting myself out there?”, “Will I regret holding back?,” and “Will I regret not taking the opportunities that will put me in the position I want to be in?”
By exploring the realities of fear, rejection, failure, and death, your beliefs about action will begin to change and your ability to consciously and consistently take the steps needed to create your ideal life will become greatly enhanced. Remember, there is an endless amount of high-profile individuals who have proven that action is the king of achievement over and over again. To produce the results that have made individuals such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, J.K. Rowlings, and The Beatles successful, you have to find a way to get yourself to act on a continuous basis.
