How to Get Yourself to Take Action When You Don’t Want To

How to get yourself to take action when you don’t want to 🙈

I coach people on their goals.

It’s what I do literally all day on Zoom.

I eat, sleep, and breathe other people’s goals.

It gives me the most magnificent insight into human potential – but also into human struggles.

One of the most common struggles I see is inaction.

Not taking action at all.

Taking some action, but not enough.

Taking action only when we feel motivated.

Taking action for a few motivated days and then stopping.

Planning to take action but getting distracted.

There are 100 reasons why you might not be taking action. Self-doubt, fear, boredom, distraction, other people’s priorities, disillusion, exhaustion.

But there’s one fool-proof way to guarantee action:

You have to make it utterly non-negotiable.

So you HAVE to. So you’ve got no choice. So you’d never even consider not doing it.

Like picking your kid up from school, or breathing.

When I lived in England, in the winter it was so cold I never wanted to go for a run, so I forced myself into it by making a rule that I wasn’t allowed to shower – unless it was to wash off sweat.

I never, ever, ever took a shower unless I had been for a run.

The longest I went without running (or a shower) was a day.

(I was inspired by the novelist, Victor Hugo, who forced himself to take action by commanding his servant to take away all his clothes each day. Left totally naked in his study, with only paper and pen, he had nothing to do but write.)

Make your most important actions non-negotiable.

Then you’ll guarantee results.

What are your non-negotiable actions?👇