Apr 24, 2024 4 min read articles

You Need To Take More Action

“Ideas without action aren’t ideas. They’re regrets” - Jeff Haden

The Chicken Or The Egg

We’ve all heard of the old saying “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. I think it’s a pretty similar dilemma with self-belief.

To build self-belief, we need to provide counter-evidence to our current limiting self-beliefs but to do this, we need to take action. And our limiting self-beliefs almost always stop us from taking said action…

You might think that telling yourself you’re confident in the mirror enough times will eventually work, but without adding action to the equation, it’s clear to see how this is impossible.

I’m not saying don’t do this, as the subconscious mind is always listening. But I'm simply putting emphasis on the importance of action.

Go ahead and tell yourself everything you want to happen in your life, even meditate on it, but you must also take the corresponding action, as only then can your wishes become reality.

Most importantly, if you want to build self-belief, you have to give yourself reasons to believe in yourself. It sounds simple, because it is, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy to choose a limiting self-belief, and then work diligently to overcome it, but this is what you must do, start with one, and then go after all of them like a mad man.

The good news is, once you prove yourself wrong once, you’ll start to believe that it’s possible in others ways too, this in turn will spark enough inspiration and self-belief to carry on going until you have confidence you never thought possible.

Create Your Luck

The difference between you and the so-called “Lucky” person is that person took action you’re too afraid to take.

What if I told you luck isn’t just something that randomly happens, but something you can create? I’m not saying you can sit in a lab and brew a magic potion of luck, but what you can do is create a situation where luck is more likely to happen.

The way to do this is through taking action, often, things that we call blind luck actually hide behind an action that could have simply never been taken.

To get you to fully understand what I am trying to say, take this completely hypothetical scenario for example. Let's say you’re looking for a very specific type of job, one that you know you’re quite unqualified for, you then find the perfect one. You debate whether calling them is a complete waste of yours and their time, but eventually, you decide to do it anyway.

To your amazement, they tell you that despite the fact you’re unqualified, you’re exactly what they’ve been looking for and would love to meet you.

Were you lucky? Yes, of course. But you created your luck. There would have been plenty of people who wouldn’t have bothered calling.

The same can be said for anyone creating any form of content. Let's say someone posts a YouTube video and it goes viral. Were they lucky? Yes, it caught the algorithm perfectly and things completely out of their control did the rest.

But people don’t consider the countless other YouTube videos that this person created without surpassing 50 views.

If you consider yourself to be an unlucky person, maybe instead consider taking more action, and do it consistently, luck will come.

Where Will You Be?

I’m coming to the end of my first year of online university studying psychology, as I also work full time, the course is part-time which means it is a 6-year course.

Many people, upon hearing how long my course is, responded with utter awe, as though they couldn’t believe someone would commit to such a long term goal. To this, I simply say “The 6 years are going to go by regardless of whether I do the course or not, so I might as well get a degree”. To this, again, they seem to respond with shock.

It is as if they have never considered this before. I have spoken to other people who have considered doing their own part-time 6-year course but couldn’t commit due to the length of the course.

Of course, I understand 6 years is a long time and it is in fact a big commitment, but this person chose to never get the degree they want, instead of getting it in 6 years?

I think people are stopping themselves from achieving the things they want due to how long it may take, without realising they are in turn deciding to never get it at all.

People are scared to take action, as they then have admitted to themselves and other people that they want something, and by doing this, they open themselves up to the possibility of ‘failing’.

Again, what they do not realise is that by choosing to avoid it and do nothing, they are choosing the only true failure.

Think of a goal you’d like to achieve, then think of a realistic time span as to how long it would take to achieve it. Is it 1 year? 5 years? 10? Now just remember that the time will go by regardless, so you might as well do something worthwhile with it.

Equally, think back to a time when you started something, but didn’t commit or see it all the way through. Where would you be with that right now, if you had decided to continue taking action?