1. Plan ahead and set your goals.
It’s highly unlikely you’ll reach your hoped-for destination if you fail to plan. I know this sounds cliché, but it simply carries truth.
Start by looking out 12 months and imagine what life looks like in regard to your practice, your health, relationships and personal growth. These goals must be real to you and important enough that you’ll sacrifice for them.
Second, break this down to 90-day intervals and plan out your first 3 months. Identify specific tasks and activities to immediately tackle each goal. This means scheduling time and actually knocking this out. If you have a significant other, include them in this exercise.
2. Begin your day with intention.
Start each day with structured activities that support your intention. Your intention being that which maximizes your impact to both you and those around you.
This might include serving others to your highest ability. You can support this by first gaining control over your thoughts so that you can fully focus on others and be present. Your structured activity might include 20 minutes of meditation or journaling.
Include activities to support your health, mind and spirit to better prepare yourself for any challenge that arises during the day.
3. Plant good seeds that produce good fruit.
Be careful to guard your thoughts against negativity and images of outcomes you don’t want. What we focus on, we nourish and like fruit is produced.
Be keenly aware when a negative emotion arises and quickly determine what thought or image preceded it. If left uninterrupted, these thoughts will tend to dominate your focus and choke out your good and productive thoughts.
By beginning your day with intention, you can set time aside to set your thoughts and images in the right direction by meditating on them. Give no attention to the negative, and it will eventually die.
4. Have gratitude.
We all can lose out on the peace and serenity that gratitude brings by simply allowing our thoughts to dwell on our challenges rather than our blessings.
Simply take the time to write down all of the wonderful blessings you were given last year.
Place them in an Evernote app on your phone so you can start and end your day reviewing them.
Sometimes we just need a brief reminder of the good in our life to turn our day around and get us back on track and in focus. To ensure tomorrow brings us blessings, we have to first give thanks to the blessings we received today.
5. Get it done!
Procrastination is the killer of dreams. Worst yet is to find justification in procrastination. Anytime you use the word “but” in explaining your perceived reason for “not getting it done”, you’re just justifying your procrastination.
Getting it done means sacrificing those activities, like social media and Netflix, until you’ve knocked out those tasks or projects that have been sitting on your shelf. Unresolved, this stuff keeps eating you up by lingering in the back or your mind creating an ongoing emotion of unease.
Start by purchasing the book, “The War of Art”, by Steven Pressfield. This gem will open your eyes up to how and why we avoid moving through inner resistance and how to break through it.
Why only 5 tips?
Because I didn’t want you to procrastinate by overwhelming you with more. Just focus on these 5 and get it done!