Now that you have the positives of taking action, now it’s time to list the negatives that will happen if you DON’T take action.
What do you stand to lose from not moving forward? There is a cost associated with not taking action when you know you should.
Here are five examples of what you might lose by not taking action:
1. Obviously, you will not get the outcome of the successful goal achievement – whatever your goal is, if you do not follow through and complete the steps, you will not benefit from the goal itself. If your goal is more money and you don’t follow through, you can expect the same or less money. If your goal is to lose weight and you don’t follow through you can expect your way to stay the same or for you to gain weight.
2. Lower self-confidence – How do you feel when you win? And how do you feel when you lose? When you take action on your goals, you build your self-confidence because those who consistently work on goals, eventually win. Without fail, they all win. Here’s a great example of a “failed” US politician. Let’s see if you can guess who it is:
- In 1832 he was defeated for state legislature
- In 1833 he failed in business
- In 1835 his sweetheart died
- Followed in 1836 when he had nervous breakdown
- In 1838 he was defeated for Speaker of the House
- In 1843 he was defeated for nomination for Congress
- In 1846 he was elected to Congress, but in 1848 he lost renomination
- In 1849 he was rejected for land officer
- In 1854 he was defeated for U.S. Senate
- In 1856 he was defeated for nomination for Vice President
- In 1858 he was again defeated for U.S. Senate
- Finally, elected President of the United States in 1860, Abraham Lincoln became one of the most successful presidents in US History
Success and self-confidence comes to those who make daily, weekly and monthly progress toward their goals…
3. Less self discipline – Completing steps means you’ll have to give up doing something else. You might have to give up an hour of TV each day or surfing the web – whatever… To give up something less fun for something more work, takes self discipline. If you can’t force yourself to give up a little bit of fun for the necessary work, then your self discipline will suffer.
4. Decreased odds of succeeding with your next goal – The skills you learn as you work the steps in your goal can be applied with your next goal or goals. That’s why we say there are no failures if you work on your goal. Goals teach us specific skills that can be reapplied to your next projects. How do you expect to learn the skills that pay you back for a lifetime if you give up before the goal is met? It doesn’t make sense. So, sticking with your goal by completing the steps is the only way to develop these skills.
5. Not developing the habit of success – Where laziness and inactivity can be become a habit, so can success. Success arises from chalking up one goal achievement and then another. But the only way you can chalk up these achievements is by performing the tasks and taking the action you know you need to take.
Will you feel better or worse about yourself if you don’t follow through? Get it all down, these negative reasons come into play when the positive reasons don’t.
When you don’t feel like working on your goal and none of the benefits seem to tickle you, pull out this list. Guilt for not doing can
This is part 23 of 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs: A 31 Day Blog Series That Will Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever! Subscribe to my free RSS feed to get the rest of the series and never miss a tip!
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