Taking Purposeful Action
A few years ago when I was going through my own personal growth and change work, I got this incredible opportunity to ask myself a question that changed my life – What is my legacy and what do I want to leave behind when I leave this planet? A question like this is a deep inquiry. You don’t get the answer to it instantly. Instead, you take it back with you, process it, sit on it, sleep on it, think and work on it with deep curiosity and intent. Working with your life coach is also a very powerful way to understanding and deepening your journey towards finding your purpose.
Finding one’s life purpose is huge – What am I here to do, what impact will that create? Having a life purpose gives us a powerful sense of direction in our lives - a directed path that is deeply fulfilling. From our life purpose will emerge goals. These goals will be directly linked and aligned to our values and fulfillment. The truth is - there’s no goal that we can’t accomplish if a) we decide we are 100% committed to achieving them b) we are willing to take purposeful action to achieve it c) we notice what’s working and what’s not d) we shift and change our strategies until we achieve what we want using what life gives us along the way.
In today’s blog, I’m going to focus on b) taking purposeful action. When we’ve set our goals it’s then really time to commit to taking purposeful action. Through my work as a mentor at the Cherie Blair Foundation and as a life coach I have the amazing opportunity to work with incredible women in different phases of their lives working to achieve meaningful goals. They often talk to me about action and the frustration they face when they don’t get the result they want instantly. I tell them there’s always an excuse or a reason for all of us to stop taking action when we don’t see the results quickly. In fact it’s just so much easier to quit than it is to keep going. That’s why we need to take purposeful action. Purposeful action is a commitment to keep taking action until we get the result we want.
To explain this concept of purposeful action better, I’d like to use a simple example, dropping your child off to school. If you are going, wait, what is she talking about, how is dropping off my child to school purposeful action then read on. Fast forward to September. It’s the start of the new term, Monday morning 7:45am. You get into your car with your child and you start driving to school. Remember its peak time - people going to work, school and places they need to be. Now you are driving in the direction of the school and if you hit a red light you are going to stop, but not panic right?
You recognise that red lights are part of the deal, and in fact before you even get in the car, you anticipate that you're probably going to have to hit some red lights and even some crazy morning peak traffic. You may not like it, but you know that it’s part of the process, and you keep going, and you keep hitting the red light, and then you keep going and you keep stopping and then you go again, till you hit the next light. If you hit a roadblock, then you’ll find an alternative route but you will still keep going. You don’t use this as a reason to stop taking the action and move forward. In fact you are willing and determined to take all the action of driving till you actually get to school and drop off your child.
That is what exactly we want to do when it comes to our goals. When we set a goal, and we commit to a certain result, we are going to hit obstacles. We are going to hit many, many red lights along the way. In the example above you would never turn around after you hit the first set of lights, say oh no this is too much and drive back home with your child and say no school today! But somehow that's what we do when it comes to our goals. We hit one obstacle, and we throw our hands in the air. We say this isn't working - I'm done. How many times have we said that?
Purposeful action for anything we do in our lives is the process of anticipating those obstacles, and being willing to fail and stop and regroup and do it again till we get the result we want. Sometimes we have to go right back to the drawing board and try again. If our goal is really important to us then we will have to find a way to tap into that positive emotion, that excitement and commitment that we made to purposeful action and then do what is required to get it done.
I want to invite you to explore what it means to take purposeful action so I will to leave you with a challenge. Find a goal that really means something to you. It could be eating clean and losing 5 pounds or being home for dinner by 7pm everyday or committing to write your thought journal everyday. Once you choose and decide on your goal, I want you to commit to purposeful action for the next 30 days. Will you fail? Probably. Will you want to use that as a reason to give up? Probably. The difference between whether you get that end result that you're looking for or not is if you are willing to try again and keep going. Taking purposeful action will get you to that end goal. So, my friends are you willing to say yes to this challenge?
I'm Poornima Nair, Certified Life Coach, NLP Practitioner and Founder of Live Authentic Coaching. If you are curious about coaching, interested in being nurtured, inspired and pushed to your edge, to discover and create the relationships, career, lifestyle, finances you are longing for, please reach out to me for a taster of what great coaching does to foster the clarity, mindset, qualities and skills that will allow you to breakthrough.