Need Some Tough Love? Read this Now. | Get Busy Living
It’s May now! Where has the time gone?
A quarter of the year is already done. The bad news is you can’t get that time back. The good news is that you have eight months left to make this your best year ever.
It’s a great time take a moment and think if you’re heading in the right direction with your goals.
- How much progress have you made this year?
- Are you putting in just a little effort?
- Did you stop and haven’t started back up?
- Do you need some tough love to make these last eight months ten times better than the first four?
Today’s post is going to get you pumped up. It’s a time to reboot.
We all have different goals we want to achieve. Some will succeed. Most will fail. If you’re in the slow lane, I want to help you to start moving with some more urgency.
Here comes the tough love.
It is not hard
Don’t you dare say it’s hard. Beating cancer is hard. Chemotherapy is hard.
Disarming land mines is hard. Running into a burning building is hard.
I bet whatever you are doing isn’t that hard.
No one is going to sympathize with you when you say, “Losing weight (or insert whatever you’re working on) is so hard.”
Come on! That. Is. Not. Hard.
Sitting in front of your computer, with the AC on and a cup of coffee next to you is not hard.
What you may think is hard is finding the time or just getting the work done. You’re not going to get any sympathy for not having enough time, when your one hundred Pinterest boards look perfectly neat.
It’s not hard to cut out the distractions if you’re really serious about it. If you still have too many, it’s cause you don’t want it bad enough. You just don’t care enough to make changes.
No one is going to sympathize with you if you complain it’s hard to lose weight if McDonald’s knows what you want when you walk into the door.
Is it too hard to start your business cause you don’t have money? Read the $100 Startup for inspiration (aff link).
You have NO excuse for not doing what you need to be doing.
We only have one shot at this life. How important is it to you to get it right?
Don’t even consider the possibility of a failure
I know we’ve all heard we need to fail in order to succeed. If we’re not failing, we’re not trying hard enough.
Forget all that for now. I want to focus on removing the thought of failure from your mind.
If you believe you’re going to fail, you will.
It’s that voice inside of you that keeps thinking “I can’t do this”, “I’m not smart enough”, “This isn’t going to work out”, “I’ll never reach my goal”.
You’ve got to get these negative words out of your vocabulary.
A grandmother lifted up a car to save her grandson who was pinned underneath. How? She never thought it wasn’t possible.
In my younger years, I considered failure, right at the very beginning! When I’d see an attractive girl, I’d try so hard to get the courage to go talk to her. I’d sit there thinking of what I would say and start playing the whole imaginary conversation. Then I would just figure I’d get rejected and imagine the embarrassment I’d feel.
I had such a horrible mindset from the beginning, I set myself up for failure. In this case, I didn’t even try because I failed before I even began.
You might be wondering, “How do I know I’ll succeed?” You don’t.
You have to just believe you will. Your other option is to believe you’ll fail. They both take the exact same amount of energy. Which will you chose?
Choose to believe in yourself.
You never HAVE to do anything you don’t want.
How old are you? You’re not under 18 anymore right? Nope. You’re all big boys and girls. Toughen up. Learn to say no (or make your Mom and Dad proud and say, “No, thank you”).
Learn to stick up for yourself. Just because you’re at a wedding reception doesn’t mean you have to kill your diet by overeating. Just because all your friends are going out doesn’t mean you have to if you have work to do.
You don’t have to do anything.
That’s the beauty of being human. We can choose what we want to do. Ants can’t stop being ants. Sharks can’t stop being sharks. Their lives are built into their genetic code.
A great lesson I learned is that even when you don’t make a choice, that is a choice.
Don’t let others make the choice for you either. Be an adult and stand your ground. If need some confidence, imagine you’re a 10 ft giant. I know it’s sound ridiculous, but you need to realize how much power you have over your own life. Make the right choices for YOU. Not for anyone else.
There’s always a choice to be made. Don’t just follow what the cool kids are doing. This isn’t middle school anymore.
You can’t hire someone to do your pushups for you
You can do all the visualizing and Law of Attraction stuff you want, but nothing is going to happen unless you put in the effort.
I’m not talking about the effort kids give when parents tell them to clean up their room (throw everything in the closet or under the bed). That’s funny then, but that kind of effort won’t work now. This is real world.
If all you do is consume, consume, consume, you have to stop! Any great business wasn’t created by someone who just read a bunch of business books. You can’t lose weight by learning how to cook and watch videos on what exercises to do (though I wish).
That’s why I love the saying “You can’t hire someone to do your pushups for you”.
You can outsource almost anything, but there are somethings you actually have to do yourself. And if you don’t, you’re not going to get the results you want.
You have to take responsibility for what you need to do. You don’t have your parents yelling at you in the other room telling you. If you’re a solopreneur, no one’s going to care if you don’t do the work. It’s up to you.
Your goals don’t happen automatically just because that’s what you want.
Stop waiting for the perfect time to start
You know when the perfect time to start is? It’s not next week or the next full moon. It’s right now.
If you keep waiting for the right time to start, you’re going to be waiting forever.
Remember you have a choice. If you don’t start, that’s your choice. I don’t want to hear the excuse that you’re waiting for the right time.
You don’t even need to take massive steps to start. I encourage small action steps.
Start researching what you want to do. That’s taking action. Start finding the steps needed to reach your goal. At least you’re doing something. But remember, don’t get too comfortable in this stage. Sooner than later you need to put it into action.
Imagine yourself a year from now
Imagine it’s one year from now. How do you want to feel? What do you want to be doing every day?
Now think about all the dreams and goals you have. A year from now, will you regret at least not trying?
If you’re in the same meaningless job, same weight, feel the same way, or have the same bad habits one year from now, how will you feel?
I’m willing to bet like crap.
The biggest regret for people on their deathbeds is not honoring their dreams. They knew it was from the choices they made, or not made.
Like I mentioned earlier, you have a choice. You made a choice to read this (you’re awesome). After you are doing, you have a choice to do something else.
Consistently make the right choices that are aligned with your goals. When you do that over time, amazing things will happen.
My friend Amy had a great quote in a post. It said “Sometimes I fear that I’ll fail…and then I think about how I’d feel if I never tried.”
Don’t let regret win.
You can do this
You’ve come too far to back out now. You’re not getting any younger. You want to do this. You need to do this! And I believe that you can do this. So stop thinking about it, and start doing.
Let’s hear from you
How were your first four months?
What will you do these next eight months to dominate this year?
If you think others need some tough love, please share this post!
Photo by mdanys
Like what you read?
If so, please join to get exclusive weekly inspirational emails, and get a FREE COPY of my eBook, Get a Life That Doesn’t Suck. Just enter your name and email below: