Are you following the directions?

I hope you are well, and I am glad you are here for this interesting question: Are you following the directions? 

My work overall, and this post specifically, is for those people out there like me – who connect with a logical approach to life and also want to see change happen more effectively in their lives.  There is a lot of logic applied in the realms of engineering, science, and finance, for example, but when it comes to our life goals there can be a void in logical explanations.  I bring logic to this area – designing our lives the way we want – because changing our lives actually does clearly follow the laws of physics!

I’m going to venture a guess…If you do have a goal right now that you are trying to reach, I am going to speculate that you have probably sought out knowledge about it already.  I’ll bet that you’ve researched or read some blogs or found some articles or listened to some podcasts…you have probably looked into it before this moment and found some good advice on the topic.

So if that’s true, I want to ask you this question.  If you’ve had the benefit of being given guidance on how to reach a goal that you have, have you been doing it?  Have you been following the directions?

I am most definitely a student of this as well.  There are goals that I am working on reaching, and I have a mentor for them.  My approach is to study the material, then put my head down and do the work.  I definitely don’t always know why some of the steps are there, but what I do know is that they are proven to work, and the person I am learning from has had success in doing it.  I am a firm believer in taking advice from people who have used it.  I’m not so keen on taking the advice of someone whose life is not an example of one I want to lead.  So if I want success, and someone successful has given me directions, then it is up to me to follow them.

I don’t know if you’ve tried to put together IKEA furniture with and without directions, but you can probably imagine the difference in results.  I love putting things together, so I have quite a bit of experience with IKEA directions – which I definitely methodically follow.  There’s a lot of possible approaches and lot of parts and tools when it comes to putting together this furniture.  Trial and error will take a very long time.  If someone gives you the order of how to put in the 50 screws, by all means put them in in that order if you want to have that bookshelf at the end.  This is a microcosmic example of what I mean in terms of reaching our goals.  Could it work in a different order?  Yes, you could probably put together some of it in a different order, but why overthink it?  It just takes more time.

If someone has set a blueprint in front of you and you want what that blueprint builds, then what are you waiting for?

What typically happens when we don’t follow directions is that we overthink it, we try to avoid parts of the process that make us uncomfortable, and we react to our own emotions – all things that impede our progress.  By going through the process, we become who we need to be along the way.

I want to encourage you – if you have the benefit of having something that you’ve been taught to do to get you to the place you want to be, the greatest gift to yourself would be to start working that plan.  I want to encourage you to do that right now.  The year is not over!  You have weeks left in 2019, and you can make significant progress this year by picking up the plan and dusting it off, starting with step one.  I would love to hear your feedback on what you’ve been stuck on and what happens when you take that first step!