Deliberation
Yesterday I wrote about acting with intent. The first step to acting deliberately is... to deliberate. To think.
What do you want (from a situation, a relationship, a career, etc.)? How much are you willing to work for it? Getting ahead in life boils down to coupling intent with action. Making goals and then acting towards them with intention. I enjoyed Atomic Habits, a book that describes techniques for ensuring follow-through- how to take a goal that might seem large or imposing, and break it down to small actions you can easily do day to day. (The techniques work-- I read this book at a time I was pretty overloaded, in a couple weeks just by committing to a small but must-read daily page target.) Small things add up. There's a cadence to these things - while daily work is good, without thinking through the big picture you risk ending up feeling like you've been working hard, but not seeing the payoff.
A good place to start is making time (even if it's just 5-10 minutes). Take a pause each day to reflect on your goals, to think about progress you've made on specific objectives and to avoid drift. I like to spend a slightly longer time at the beginning of each week to think bigger picture (Heifetz called this periodic exercise in seeking perspective "getting on the balcony"). It's also super important to be kind to yourself- don't beat yourself up if you drop the ball, just notice this and then pick the practice right back up.
Real progress compounds. So, maintaining this focus over time, checking off actions you take returns a real benefit. While this all sounds very simple - the reality is that life is busy, there are many things out of all of our control and it's easy to get caught up in the urgent vs the important. Then - you look up and a week, a month - years have gone by.
Photo by Namitha Vinod on Unsplash
