Are You Unconsciously Saying “No” To Your Goals & Dreams?
As we work towards achieving our goals, we tend to think of having to make a giant leap to get from where we are now to where we want to be. Looking at the situation from that higher-level perspective is useful, but we feel overwhelmed by the gap and we can miss some important detail.
When we zoom in, we see that giant leap is actually the accumulation of lots of small steps. And those small steps are made up of the decisions we make and then the actions we take every day.
Your life is the sum total of your decisions.
Where you are in your life, your health, the state of your relationships, your income level, your achievements, your social group, your emotional state, your education, your career or business, is a result of every decision you have ever made up till now. Just let that sink in for a second.
If you're not completely satisfied with your life, or with some aspect of it, the way you start to change that is to become more conscious about the choices you make every day.
If you haven't achieved your goal yet, it's probably because you're not making decisions on a daily basis that serve you.
We want to start to make decisions that serve us better, that move us towards our goals and dreams.
I find a tremendous amount of wisdom and insight in the etymology of words. The word decide comes from Latin roots which means to kill off or to cut off. To decide literally means to kill off your other options. If you kill off your other options, you're going to be far more committed to this course of action that you've decided on.
If you just try to use sheer willpower to control your choices, it won't work consistently. You need to go upstream and connect your choices up to your goals and think about your daily choices in the context of your goals or dreams. That way you're able to prioritise between the short-term choice that doesn't serve you and the longer-term decision that creates positive momentum.
Abraham Lincoln said, “Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”
So if you want to achieve your goal, you have to start saying “no” to what you want now and saying “yes” to what you want more.
Every time you make a decision, you are saying yes to something and saying no to something else. You're killing off that other option.
You might say that you want to build your music career, and you say that you don't have enough time to do it, but you spend 3 hours every night binge-watching Netflix. In that moment as you're deciding to watch Netflix, ask yourself “If I'm saying “yes” to binge-watching Netflix, what am I saying “no” to?” And then you want to go as far down that rabbit hole as you can, extrapolate all the consequences of making this decision. You're saying “no” to spending that time working on your music career, writing and recording songs, to learning about how to market your music, to building your audience, to selling more music, to making a sustainable income from your music, quitting your day job and doing music full-time, to having the freedom and flexibility to live your life on your own terms, to creating the life of your dreams. Do you want to be saying no to all of these things? Of course not.
By saying yes to Netflix, you're saying no to your dream of having a music career and the joy and fulfilment that would bring you, you're killing that option off.
Now you want to flip that. We want to start saying “no” to the things that drag us off course from achieving our goals.
It's easier to say “no” to something if you know what you're saying “yes” to.
If you're going to say yes to building your music career and all of the other benefits of that that I just outlined, you need to say no to binge-watching Netflix.
Maybe it's not Netflix for you. Maybe you need to say no to scrolling through Facebook for 2 hours every day. Maybe you need to say no to playing video games every day. Maybe you need to say no to going out and drinking with your friends.
This is about prioritising. If you say that you're serious about building your music career but you consistently make these poor daily decisions, you're not serious because you're not willing to prioritise your career over TV, video games, etc. Would you rather watch Netflix and play video games and drink with your friends, or would you rather build a successful music business? You can't do both because you've only got limited time. So it requires some sacrifice.
This applies to any goal you might have. Maybe you want to lose weight. But you're saying yes to eating fast food several times a week, or saying yes to drinking soft drink every day, or saying yes to eating lots of bread and pasta and carbs. By saying yes to any of these, you're saying no to losing those 10 kgs of belly fat. You're saying no looking better with your shirt off or in a bikini. You're saying no to feeling better about your body and feeling sexier. You're saying no to feeling better about yourself, having better self-esteem. You're saying no to feeling more confident. You're saying no to feeling better IN your body by not having to carry around the extra weight. You're saying no to having more energy.
This week as you're making decisions every day about how to spend your time or what you eat, ask yourself in the moment as you're making a decision “If I'm saying yes to this thing that gives me short-term instant gratification, what am I saying no to in the longer term that's more important to me?”
Developing that awareness is how we stop making choices that sabotage us, undermine us, keep us stuck and not moving towards our goals, or even moving further away from them.
It's making these decisions consistently on a daily basis that creates habits, and our habits make or break us. They either serve us or they sabotage us.