When the going is easy it’s easy to keep going. When it’s hard is the time to remember our POWER to keep going. They don’t make movies about people that always had it easy. We must be the hero in our own journey by remembering our POWER in the face of adversity.
To remember our POWER requires we first find and know our POWER. We can then harness it in a way so we can access it as needed when life bucks us off.
Here is a five step process to develop, cultivate, and access our POWER to achieve greater success.
P – Plan our purpose, perpetuate our plan. As Shawn Achor writes in his book the Happiness Advantage “Be a Reality Architect. You can choose to live a life where life happens to you. Or you can live a life where life comes from you.” Taking the time to establish why we are here and how to affect it is powerful beyond measure. Planning our purpose is investing time to ponder and take inventory of our talents, gifts, and learnings so we can clearly see how sharing those with the world can make a profound impact. Once we are clear of our purpose we can then bring it to those whom can benefit from it. This clarity creates a vacuum that pulls us into action to do what must be done.
O – Observe where we currently are, where we are headed if we continue our ways, and where we want to be headed by altering our ways. Where we are today is the result of our thoughts, beliefs, and actions up to this point. Where we will be in the future will be the result of our thoughts, beliefs, and actions during the interim. We must be realistic as to whether we are on the right trajectory. The hero in the end is the one willing to change their thinking and behaviors. It’s the new thoughts and actions that will carry us to our desired outcome.
W – Write down our desired destination and associate to it daily by visceralizing. Visceralizing is combining the seeing clearly in our mind what we want to come about in our life and feeling, in our gut, what it will feel like having already achieved it. In her book, Creative Visualization Shakti Gawain shares, “We always attract into our lives whatever we think about most, believe most strongly, expect on the deepest level, and imagine most vividly.” By writing down what we desire and making it ubiquitous, we can continually access it and reactivate it.
E – Engage in activities that are in alignment with getting us where we want to be. Above, it’s stated we must be willing to change our thoughts and actions. Engaging activates the change we seek. At first, the new or increased activities may feel foreign to our norm. Through repetition, they will surely and naturally become our way. To step into our full potential we must remember this – rather than permitting our current way to hold us back, or keep us where we are, we must make a committed decision to shift our patterns and habits regardless of how difficult it may be for a temporary period.
R – Review our day and calibrate our tomorrow. Start small and go big. At the end of each day celebrate and be grateful for what went well regardless of how small an accomplishment it may be. Take that momentum and increase the target for tomorrow. In his book The ONE Thing, Gary Keller writes about The Domino Effect which states – when one thing, the right thing, is set in motion, it can topple many things. He references a physics study by Lorne Whitehead who goes on to inform us how a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is actually 50 percent larger than itself and how the geometric progression is explosive. Starting with a only 2 inch domino…by the time it gets to number 10 it can knock over a man standing 6’5”; by number 23 it’s knocking over the Eifel Tower; by number 31 Mt. Everest comes down and It all started with a 2 inch domino.
Let’s connect in with our POWER and also acknowledge and celebrate the 2 inch domino today for its progression will carry us along our planned purposeful path.
Make it up, make it fun, and get it done!