Doubt increases with inaction, clarity reveals itself in momentum. Growth comes from progress. For all these reasons BEGIN!

Today I’m going to look at how overthinking deepens fear while taking massive action crushes it.

You know, I was brought up on the adage that “if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well”.

The way I interpreted that, was to sit down and plan things out to the last detail. Give careful consideration to everything before, I took any action. Think things through, not rush into something. 

But you know there is a big down side to that. 

The more you sit down and think about something, the more you start to question your ability, the more you start to say to yourself, can I do this? 

The more that little voice in your head starts to come up with objections and questions. Taking immediate action has a lot going for it.  

When you take immediate, massive, imperfect take action, you don't give that little voice time to start messing things up for you.

The key is little voice control

Little voice control is essential if you want to be successful. It's simple: if you think you can... you're right; if you think you can't you're right. 

I’ve learnt that the hard way. We all have conversations in our head, sometimes consciously, often subconsciously.

We all talk to ourselves constantly, particularly if we are not busy and we have got time to let our minds wander. If you are busy and you are constantly taking action, that little voice is usually not so active. 

It’s important for you to realize this and control your little voice.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t think things through. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t plan carefully, but you must reach a balance where planning and thinking things through does not become a block to action.

In most instances, unless you are an expert, whatever you do will have its setbacks. There’s a good chance that in many things that you do, you’ll fail. 

There is nothing wrong with failing. 

Failure is just another means of learning. They say Edison failed 10,000 times before he got the light bulb right. His response to that was something like: "I didn’t fail 10,000 times, I just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work!"

That’s the right attitude to have. You have to learn, and you learn quickest from failure. By learning yourself, you get better at it, and the result is less failures. It’s all a question of failing forward with confidence.

Going back to this business of thinking being a block to action, especially in the beginning stages when you're becoming an entrepreneur, that you really have to get control of. 

If you don’t, you can build up so much fear in your mind, that you can become almost paralyzed. There is no reason for that at all, everybody who becomes an entrepreneur goes through failure. 

So, it's just a question of coming to terms with failure, accepting the fact that failure is going to become part of the process and embracing the process.

Little voice mastery, developing a business mindset and the ability to take action, these are the things that make the difference between the rapid progress of one entrepreneur compared to another. Between a successful one and a not so successful one.

It's critical to develop a growth mindset

Everything starts in your head, every thought before every action. If you have a very positive mindset, what they call a growth mindset, where you’re constantly willing to learn and pat yourself on the back for the good things that happen, and not concentrate on the bad things, then you have a much, much greater chance of success. 

Every success should be celebrated, however small.

Once you start to take action it builds on itself. You start to gain momentum and with momentum comes success. 

With success comes confidence and with confidence, big dreams and the ability to think on a grander scale and accomplish things on a bigger scale. 

But that won’t happen if that little monkey on your shoulder is constantly questioning whether you are capable, whether you have the talent, contacts, knowledge and skills etc. People like that have a fixed mindset.

They fail to realize that with effort and patience all these obstacles can be overcome.  

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith

It used to be, and I’m sure it is still the case now, when someone wants to teach a baby to swim, they just gently lower them in the water and they swim naturally. 

If you put a baby at the side of the pool, when they are not used to water, they will take forever to get in. They will take forever to learn to swim and might even develop a fear of water. Just like adults babies can overthink everything and develop unfounded fears.

So sometimes you just have to take the bull by the horns, you have to just take a leap of faith. There is no reason not to have faith in yourself. If you succeed, you have a win for yourself which you should celebrate and you can develop on that and go on to the next win and the next win. 

If you sit there thinking about the task at hand, you build fear in your mind, you will only expand on that too. You will end up with more fear and more fear until you become almost incapable of taking any action.

Stop thinking about the things that could go wrong and concentrate on the things that could go right and how that would make you feel.

What you have to do is learn to look on the positive side. If you can look on the positive side with regard to yourself and your own abilities, and ignore that little voice in your mind and just take action, the funny part about it is, a good percentage of the time, you’re going to prove that little voice wrong.

Most of what we fear never happens. We create our own roadblocks.

So, you were thinking negative thoughts, questioning your ability, wondering whether you should do something, for nothing … for nothing.  

In actual fact, when you took the action you succeeded. So why even have those negative thoughts in the first place? Don’t give them a chance to accumulate, don’t question yourself, have confidence in yourself. What you will find is that many people will have confidence in you, it’s you, that tends not to have confidence in you.

Those who take action, whether it be good or bad, succeed eventually. Those who sit at the sidelines and overthink and hesitate, don’t succeed. 

Taking action builds confidence, strength and a positive outlook while giving clarity to the objective. 

Tony Robbins, the renowned Personal Development Trainer, will tell you to take action, however small, the minute you make the decision to do something. He maintains that taking that first step in any endeavour builds momentum and makes the second step that much easier. 

Also by taking the first step you have made a commitment you wouldn’t have, had you not taken action. 

In your mind, you are already on the journey to reaching your goal. Can you think of any good reason to disagree with Tony?

Don't let a big goal overwhelm you, break it down into smaller action steps

Sometimes if you have a fertile mind, you may get excited about a project. You think of the many action steps you can take. 

What if I do this? What if I do that and that …. and that? 

Soon what looked like a fun project has become a daunting series of never ending tasks … overwhelm and overload set in. 

The excitement ebbs and thoughts of overwhelm wake up your little voice. At this point it’s time to remember the “munchies”. 

The munchies are bite sized action steps that can be easily accomplished. 

So, you break your expanded project down into phases. Then you break each phase down into these easy bite sized tasks which when accomplished, one after the other, in quick succession get you well onto completing the first phase. 

Rinse and repeat until each phase, and ultimately the project is finished. 

Remember any prioritized action, however small, towards the accomplishment of a goal is a step in the right direction.

When you start a new business, there are so many things to do, new responsibilities to take on, new skills to learn, new challenges to overcome, that fear, overwhelm and doubt are always in the back of your mind, ready to feed your little voice with negative rhetoric. 

Learn to control that little voice so that it is primarily saying positive, reaffirming affirmations that propel you to the next action, and the next, and the next until … suddenly your project is complete or your business launched!

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