“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Leonardo Da Vinci

To get things done you need to take action. Things seldom happen on their own.

But taking action can be difficult and hard. And so it’s easy to wind up being lazy or in Procrastinationland a lot. How can you break out of such behaviour and develop a behaviour of taking more action?

Here are 10 tips that you’ll hopefully find useful.

1. Reconnect with the present moment.

This will help you snap out of over thinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done.

This is probably the best tip I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort.

One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on you breathing for a minute or two.

2. Be accountable to others.

If you tell a bunch of people that you are going to do something then it will be hard to not do it. You don’t want to disappoint them. Or have to face up to them the next time you meet.

If you have a hard time getting going with something get some support. If you for instance workout, do it with a friend to motivate each other to take action – and actually go to the gym – when motivation runs low. Motivating each other and bringing enthusiasm when one of you is feeling low can really help to develop consistency and useful habits.

Think about how you can involve others to help all of you to take more action (no matter if that’s about your health, starting your own blog or business or spending more time on your hobby).

This tip works well. But it can put you in situation where you take action to avoid pain, to avoid judgement. And it can help you create pressure within yourself. Such a state may not always be the best one to be in to take action and perform well. One way to lessen such problems is to use this tip and then when you are about to take action you reconnect with the present moment to quiet negativity within yourself.

3. Be accountable to yourself.

In the long run a more consistent and perhaps healthier way to develop a habit of taking more action is to answer to yourself instead of others. To set your own standards and principles for how you will behave.

The problem with this one is that you are likely to cheat on yourself and rationalize how you don’t need to take action or follow your principles. When the social pressure of having to answer to others isn’t there it’s easy to slip and fall into laziness or procrastination.

But over time you can become more and more consistent with acting according to your own standards. I believe that one of the keys to develop this kind of thinking is to get off a dependence on external validation and be more internally validated.

If you can develop accountability to your own standards then it can be more consistent than the one you get from relying on being accountable to others. It comes from within so it doesn’t have to rely on other, outer circumstances that may fluctuate.

It is also very useful to help you feel good about yourself and to help you grow. If you rely on being accountable to others and their validation then you may grow but also feel confined by what others expect from you. If you are accountable to yourself then you set your limits wherever you want them.

4. Lighten up.

One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and becomes easier to get started with.

5. Use a limited to-do list.

A to-do list is a simple and great way to remember what you are about to do. But it’s easy to get overly enthusiastic when writing it and putting in to many items. And then when you look at that big list you feel drained and an urge to procrastinate.

But do you need to do all those things?

Think about what the absolutely most important items on the list are. Just two or three. Then put them on a new to-do list. This list will seem less daunting and I have found that it makes it easier to actually take action and get those things done.

6. Choose instead of should.

Here’s a small but useful tip.

You don’t really need to do anything. You always choose what to do.

Thinking about things this way removes the “shoulds” and “need tos” that take your personal power away and make you feel like you aren’t in control. When you think that you choose to do whatever you do then you regain the control and power. And it becomes easier to take action.

7. Focus on the how instead of the if’s.

What if’s can really mess with your mind. You can spend days, weeks or years thinking about what may happen if you take action.

So instead of letting your mind get lost in what if’s focus on the how. In a situation focus on how you can do something, how you can solve a problem or achieve a goal. Do some research if you need to. Or get support and help from other people.

Focusing on the how puts your mind to better use and creates a positive attitude within rather than a negative and uncertain one. This makes it easier to take action without too much hand wringing and time spent over thinking things.

8. Get enthusiastic.

Enthusiasm is great emotional state to be in to get going and take action. And if you aren’t feeling enthusiastic then that’s OK too. You can pretty much always create enthusiasm within yourself.

9. Start small.

To get from a state where you just feel like sitting on your chair and doing nothing much – or to one where you take action over and over you can do this: start small.

Getting started with your biggest task or most difficult action may seem too much and land you in Procrastinationland. Or leave you in a headspace where you can stop overthinking. So instead, start with something that doesn’t seem so hard.

One of my favorites is simply to take a few minutes to clean my desk. After that the next thing doesn’t seem so difficult to get started with since I’m now in a more of a take action kind of mode.

Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch.
Steve Droke

Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Douglas MacArthur

Enthusiasm is wonderful. Why?

Off the top of my head, here are four powerful reasons:

Now. Those are some good reasons to become more enthusiastic more of the time. But how?

Here are seven tips that I have used over the years. And it may be good to remember that the more you practise being enthusiastic the easier to it becomes to be enthusiastic.

1. Find out what you really like to do.

This is the most important tip as it can generate enormous and sustained amounts of enthusiasm without you having to do much about it at all. Enthusiasm will flow naturally a lot of the time when you are doing whatever you really like to do.

Some examples of such activities may include meeting new people, helping others, go fishing, listening to and talking about music, workout etc.

If you can spend more time doing those activities that make you enthusiastic then you are likely to feel enthusiastic more of the time. Perhaps you can even make a living off one of your favourite activities.

2. Go deeper, learn more.

Over the years I have time after time discovered how enthusiasm can work. If you are not enthusiastic it is often because you don’t know enough about the person/topic/job. It’s easy to get stuck in preconceptions about something or someone. But if you go deeper, you will often find fascinating stuff that will spark your enthusiasm. So just start, get going and a lot of the time enthusiasm will find you along the way.

3. See what’s positive in any situation.

Then build on that to get your enthusiasm going. Perhaps it’s just a thing or two. But that glimmer of positivity can be a starting point to change your perspective to a more positive one where you can find enthusiasm. And whatever the situation you are in will often be easier and more pleasurable to handle.

4. Get an enthusiastic vibe from other people.

Here’s where you can experience just how powerful enthusiasm is when we communicate with each other. Listen to CDs with enthusiastic people – Brian Tracy and especially Tony Robbins is two helpful guys – for perhaps 20 minutes and when you are done listening you’ll probably feel a lot more enthusiastic.

Or hang out with enthusiastic people and get them to talk about what they are enthusiastic about. Enthusiasm is contagious, so use that fact to help yourself (and others when you are feeling enthusiastic).

5. Act yourself into an enthusiastic state.

Emotions work backwards too. Move and talk like you do when you are enthusiastic. Take the actions that you take when you are enthusiastic. And soon acting as you would like to feel will actually make you feel enthusiastic.

6. Keep your energy up.

These last two tips are helpful to more easily reach an enthusiastic state and to stay there.

It takes energy to be enthusiastic. So if you are having trouble feeling that emotion then it might be because one or more basic energy problems. So get enough sleep. Eat well and not more or less than enough. Work out. Drink plenty of water.

7. Be careful with your information intake.

Negative and apathetic voices from media or people around you can quickly drain your enthusiasm. Replace such intake with more enthusiastic and positive sources. Don’t let you enthusiasm drown in a sea of negative voices.

What is your best tip for increasing enthusiasm?

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 40 years I’m pretty sure you know who Bruce Lee was. :)

If you have, then you may be interested to know that Lee was a very famous martial artist and actor who sparked the first big interest of Chinese martial arts in the West in the 60’s and 70’s.

But besides being an awesome fighter and iconic figure Lee also had some very useful things to say about life.

Here are 7 of my favourite fundamentals from Bruce Lee.

1. What are you really thinking about today?

“As you think, so shall you become.”

Perhaps the most basic statement of how we work. Think about what you are thinking today. What do those thoughts say about you? About your life? And how well do they really match your plans for your life and your image of yourself?

It’s easy to forget about this simple statement in everyday life. It’s easy to be quite incongruent with what you think on an ordinary day compared to how you view yourself and your goals.

A simple external reminder such as a post-it with this quote can be helpful to keep you and your thoughts on the right track.

An brilliant and beautiful expansion on this thought can be found in James Allen’s “As a man thinketh”.

2. Simplify.

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more. One problem with this may be that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though. And so your efforts to improve become short-lived.

Adding more and more just creates more stress, worries and anxiety. Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do. And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease.

This has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing even more while you are doing it.

Adding more thoughts and thinking things over for the 111:th time may create a sense of security. It’s also a good way to procrastinate and to avoid taking that leap you know you should take. And the more you think, the harder it gets to act. Perhaps because you want to keep that comforting sense of security and avoid the risk of wrecking that feeling.

Thinking has its place. It can help you plan a somewhat realistic route to your goal and help you avoid future pitfalls. Overthinking is however just a habit that will help you waste a lot of time. It’s more useful to replace that habit with the habit of just doing it.

3. Learn about yourself in interactions.

“To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”

The one person that is the hardest to get to really know may be yourself. Studying yourself while you are alone may result in some insights. But it’s also likely to produce a lot of made up thought loops and doubts in your mind.

A good way to really learn more about yourself is study yourself in interactions with other people. How people react and act in these interaction can over time teach you a lot. And what you think and how you react can perhaps teach you even more.

What you see, feel and hear in other people may be a reflection of you. The things you learn by thinking this way may not always be pleasant, but they can be enlightening. They help you to see yourself and also how you may be fooling yourself.

And these powerful insights can be very valuable for your personal growth. So, in interactions with others, try asking yourself: what is reflected?

4. Do not divide.

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

This is a very useful and powerful thought. It is also one that obviously is hard to live by. Why? I believe it’s because the ego loves to divide and find ways to “add more” to itself. It want’s to feel better than someone else. Or more clever. Or prettier. Or cooler. Or wiser.

How can you overcome this way of thinking and feeling?

To me it seems to boil down to not identifying so much with your thoughts or feelings. That doesn’t mean that you stop thinking or feeling. It just means that you realize – and remember in your everyday life – that the thoughts and emotions are just things flowing through you.

You are not them though.

You are the consciousness observing them.

When you realize and remember this it enables you to control the thoughts and feelings instead of the other way around. It also enables you to not take your thoughts too seriously and actually laugh at them or ignore them when you feel that your ego is acting out. When you are not being so identified these things you become more inclined to include things, thoughts and people instead of excluding them.

This creates a lot of inner and outer freedom and stillness. Instead of fear, a need to divide your world and a search for conflicts.

To learn more about this I would recommend Eckhart Tolle’s books like “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth”.

5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others.

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

The ego wants to add because it thinks it’s not enough. One way of doing that is by craving validation from others. We want to feel smart, pretty, successful and so on. And the validation makes you feel good for a while. But soon you need a new fix.

And the problem with being dependent on validation from other people is that you let other people control how you feel. This creates a rollercoaster of emotion in your life.

To find more emotional stability and to take control of how you feel you need to get your validation from to a more consistent source. Yourself. You can replace the expectations and validation of others by setting your own expectations and by validating yourself.

And so you validate yourself by thinking about how awesome you are. You don’t sell yourself short. You appreciate how far you have come and the positive things you have done. You appreciate your own value in the world. You set goals and you achieve those goals. This builds confidence in yourself and in your abilities. These things will help you to build a habit of inner validation.

Now, showing off. Why do we do that? To get validation from others. However, this need for validation often shines through and that is why a thing like bragging seldom works. Instead of seeing the cool and successful person you are trying to project people just see the insecure and needy person looking for validation. And your bragging falls flat.

6. Be proactive.

“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

It’s easy to get locked into a reactive mindset. You just follow along with whatever is happening. You do what the people around you do. You react to whatever is going on.

And so you get lost in your circumstances. This way of thinking doesn’t feel too good. You tend to feel powerless and like you are just drifting along.

A more useful and pleasurable way of living is to be proactive. As Bruce says: to create opportunities despite the circumstances around you. This feels better and provides better results (no matter if that with your blog or business, while dating or when it comes to your health). But on the other hand it’s also more difficult. It’s easier to just drift along in the reactive stream of life.

And if you want to be proactive then you may have to take the lead quite often. And that can be scary.

Still, living proactively is so much more rewarding and exciting.

7. Be you.

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

Just being yourself is a hard thing to do. You may do it sometimes. And other times you may forget or fall back into old thought patterns. Or you may imitate someone else.

And that comes through too. And it may work.

But I believe that being the real you will work better. Because there the genuine you is shining through. Without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness. It’s you to 100%. It’s you with not only your words but you with your voice tonality and body language – which some say is over 90% of communication – on the same wavelength as your words. It’s you coming through on all channels of communication.

So I’m not saying: “yeah man, you should just be yourself because it’s the right thing to do etc”.

I’m saying that I think being your authentic self – the one where you do little dividing, the one that needs little validation from others, the one where your ego is not running the show and trying to get something from someone – will give you better results and more satisfaction in your day to day life because you are in alignment with yourself.

And because people really like genuine and people really like authenticity.

Want more inspiration for your daily life? Have a look at this post with Monday blessings and this one filled with Thursday blessings to keep your focus on gratitude and joy in your day to day life.

I’m not much of a jealous guy. I feel jealousy sometimes but it often passes pretty quickly and without the almost burning intensity some people seem to experience.

Still, I have of course thought about this problem and found a few ways to overcome it when it arises within. Hopefully this article can help you to decrease this destructive feeling in your life.

Stop comparing yourself to others.

Comparing what you have to what others have is a good way to make yourself miserable. It feeds your ego when you buy a nicer car or get a better job than someone else. You feel great for a while.

But this mindset and the focus on comparing always winds up in you noticing someone that has more than you. That someone has an even better job or car than you. And so you don’t feel so good anymore.

The thing is that there is always someone with better or more than you. So you can never “win”. You just feel good for a while and then you don’t.

A more useful way to compare is to just compare yourself to yourself. Look at how you have grown and what you have achieved. Appreciate what you have done and what you have, how far you have come and what you are planning to do. This will make you make you more positive and emotionally stable since you are no longer comparing and feeling jealous of what the other guy has that you haven’t.

Develop an abundance mentality.

Jealousy often seems to come from a perceived scarcity in some area of your life. Maybe you feel jealous because someone else got the job you wanted. Or because someone else got the opportunity that you had hoped for. Perhaps you are feeling jealous because you are afraid of losing something and feel that if you do then you have hit rock bottom.

Comparing yourself to others seems to be a symptom of this belief of scarcity. And you feel jealous because someone else has gotten one of those scarce things or opportunities that you wanted.

Focusing your mind on the scarcity can really screw with your thoughts, feelings and life. It can cause much stronger negative emotions than is really reasonable. And it gets you really stuck in the jealousy, intensifying it, making it stronger and more long-lasting by feeding it with more thoughts and emotional energy.

To get out of this confining and destructive mentality you can develop an abundance mentality. An abundance mentality tells you that there are always new chances and opportunities.

That there are always new business opportunities to find, new tests in school to take and new people to date/make friends with. This relieves much of the pressure you may feel if you have a scarcity mentality that makes you think that you only got this shot right now. Or makes you feel like an utter failure just because you just stumbled and things didn’t work out.

An abundance mentality allows you to feel more of an inner emotional freedom and it makes you more relaxed and positive. I believe that developing an abundance mentality is the most important step in reducing or overcoming jealousy because when you feel that there is always an abundance then there is little to feel jealous about. And whenever you feel jealousy starting to creep in you can stop or drastically reduce its power over you by switching your focus from the scarcity to the abundance in the world.

Surrender.

And develop a habit of not identifying so much with your thoughts and emotions.

Although just switching my focus to the abundance usually seems to work to overcome jealousy I thought I’d share another way to has also been helpful. This method is useful if you have been carrying the negative emotion for a while and don’t seem to be able to get rid of it.

And it’s basically this: stop fighting your jealousy. Surrender to it instead and just accept it. This may sound counter-intuitive. But the thing is that you are feeding the emotional loop with more energy by resisting the emotion.

When you surrender to the emotion and let it in then you stop feeding it. And it goes away. Here’s one practical way of doing this:

Say yes to the feeling.

Surrender and let it in. Observe the feeling in your mind and body without labelling or judging it. If you let it in – for me the feeling then often seems to physically locate itself to the middle of my chest – and just observe it for maybe a minute or two the feeling just vanishes.

I would also recommend to not identify so much with your thoughts and emotions. This basically means that you realize, learn and remember that you are not your thoughts or emotions.

You are the one observing them. They are just things passing through you.

If you learn to identify less with your thoughts and emotions then you don’t have to do the exercise above so often. You just accept your thoughts and feelings in a more automatic way and let them pass without getting all wrapped up in them.

Think about what’s in it for you.

I don’t know if this pretty analytical method works for a lot of people. But I have found it to be helpful in many cases when I have negative thoughts or when I’m behaving in a less than useful way.

Basically, I ask myself: What’s in it for me? And each time I fall back into that negative headspace and behavior I remind myself of this question and the answer.

This reinforces to me the pointlessness of what I’m thinking. And often I just think to myself: Oh, I’m being stupid again. Time to focus on something useful/fun/positive instead.

Asking yourself what is in it for you is a good way to find distance from your thoughts and behavior and to motivate yourself to just drop the less useful stuff whenever you can.

Think about what your jealousy is telling you.

This is an interesting and useful way to look at jealousy.

As I wrote a few days ago – in Epictetus’ Top 7 Timeless Pearls of Wisdom – what you think and feel about the world can often tell you quite a bit about yourself.

So thinking about what your jealousy tells you about yourself can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself. Think about what is reflected when you feel jealous of someone else.

Is a fear of rejection? Of not being good enough?

Or a fear that you will lose something/someone/some part of yourself you feel very attached to? If so, why are you feeling so attached?

Try to find a solution or help – from books, people, the internet etc. – for whatever fear or belief within you that you think is making you feel the jealousy. Ask yourself: what can the jealousy reveal to me? How can I grow from this insight?

Now, who is Epictetus you may ask?

He was a Greek philosopher that lived about 1900 years ago. When he was young he was a slave in Rome but was later released and started to teach philosophy first in Rome and later on in Greece.

Epictetus was somewhat of a lonesome minimalist.

He lived with few possessions and by himself for a long time. He also seems to never have written anything, but luckily his thoughts were recorded by his pupil Arrian.

Here are seven excellent pearls of wisdom from Epictetus.

If you are going your own way, prepare for reactions.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

Besides being a funny quote I believe it is very relevant to self-improvement.

If you start changing then people may react in different ways. Some may be happy for you. Some may be indifferent. Some may be puzzled or react in negative and discouraging ways.

Much of these reactions are probably not so much about you but about the person who said it and his/her life. How they feel about themselves is shining through in the words they use and judgements they make.

And that’s OK. Most likely they won’t react as negatively as you may imagine. Or they will probably at least go back to focusing on their own challenges pretty soon.

You choose to be insulted.

“It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.”

What you feel and how you react to something is always up to you. There may be a “normal” or a common to react to different things. But that mostly just all it is. You can choose your own thoughts, reactions and emotions to pretty much everything. You don’t have to freak out, overreact of even react in a negative way. Perhaps not every time or instantly. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction just goes off. Or an old thought habit kicks in.

But as you realize that no-one outside of yourself can actually control how you feel you can start to incorporate this thinking into your daily life and develop it as a thought habit. A habit that you can grow stronger and stronger over time. Doing this makes life a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

Forget about what you think you know.

“It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”

If you think that you already know something then your mind will not be open to actually learning it. Whatever someone is telling you your mind will sort through based on what you think you know. You’ll only hear and learn what you what you want to hear and learn.

So whenever you want to learn anything it may be a good tip to disregard as much as possible of what you think you know. In my experience this makes it easier to pick things up and not disregard important stuff.

Of course, the ego often wants to jump in to meddle and strengthen itself by making you think that you already know whatever you’re about to learn. Be careful in trusting that somewhat arrogant inner voice. :)

Listen.

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

This is a useful piece of advice in just about any interaction. It’s useful when learning something new. And it’s helpful just while in a regular conversation. It’s not always easy to stick to it though. Sometimes you get too excited about something to keep quiet. Sometimes you just want to brag or recount what happened. Having the attention of all the other people feels good. So how do you get around this habit of hogging the spotlight?

One useful way is to just forget about yourself. Focus your attention outward instead of inward in a conversation. Place the mental focus on the person you are talking and listening to instead of yourself. Placing the focus outside of yourself makes you less self-centred and your need to hog the spotlight decreases.

If you start to actually listen to what people are saying it also becomes easier to find potential paths in the conversation. By asking open-ended questions – the ones that will give you more than a yes or no answer – you can explore these paths and have better and more fun conversations.

Appreciate what you have.

“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”

One good way to live a miserable life is to constantly focus on what you don’t have. If you appreciate what you have you’ll find everyday life more pleasurable. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on what you want.

To me it’s more about focusing on what you want and not keeping your focus in a more popular place: on what you lack. This will make it easier to get what you want since you always seem to notice and receive more of whatever you focus you mind upon.

Notice what is reflected.

“When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.”

I really like this one because I’ve become more and more interested in how we relate to each other. Like how what someone says about you may not be much of a reflection of you but of the person that said it.

This is a good thing to remember whenever someone is saying something negative about you. It’s also useful to remember whenever you feel negatively about someone else. It can not only help you forget about your negative emotion. It can also help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself.

Suffering is optional. And so is happiness.

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

“I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?”

“It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.”

Suffering is optional. And so is happiness. What you choose to think about determines how you feel. Now, again, it may be “normal” and common to go through a lot of mind-made suffering after the initial pain that ignited the suffering. And it’s easy to slip back into old thoroughly ingrained thought habits.

One tip that I have found helpful for this is to learn to reconnect as much as possible with the present moment. Suffering is to a large extent created when your mind is thinking thoughts about either the past or a possible future.

It is also very useful to realize that you are not your thoughts or emotions. They are just things that are flowing through you. But they are not you. You are the one observing them. This realization can gradually free you more and more from keeping negative thought and emotions going. Whenever they arise and you realize that you aren’t them, that you don’t have to identify with them their power over you fades and vanishes quicker than if you had identified with them completely.