Taking action is a great way to observe your mindset. Awareness and reflection are amazingly powerful skills, but nothing can match action when it comes to observing your mindsets. Think of an important goal that you have where you feel stuck. Reflecting how you got stuck and what to do now can be a great method for brainstorming. Even faster though is to take a concrete action towards your goal. This need not be a “big step” in fact small actions can often work even better to uncover mindset.
Start small and look for resistance. Maybe your goal is to run a marathon, but cannot find the motivation or time to train. Start by taking a 10-minute jog. Observe what comes up in your inner thoughts—what are you telling yourself about this action? Maybe the first small action will go great with no resistance—not to worry! Keep adding small actions until you experience inner resistance. When you do, note down what thoughts are going on in your head. Later when you have a moment, consider how these thoughts might be linked to deeper beliefs about marathons, fitness or overall health. The places where you notice resistance are starting points for evolving your mindset. (See previous posts for more detail on uncovering your mindset).
Don’t confuse action and motion. Often, we confuse action (taking a concrete step towards a goal) and motion (any activity generally related to your goal). For example, if your goal is to increase your public speaking skills, an action would be to volunteer to give a presentation at work to a small group. Motion on the other hand would be to read yet another book on public speaking. See the difference? The action in this example will concretely show you where you are in regards to your goal, and give you the practice you need to improve. The book on the other hand (unless you really don’t know anything about public speaking), provides you very little new information, and zero practice. It simply allows you to pretend you are working towards your goal. If you want to reach ambitious goals, you need to take action.
So why do we avoid taking action? The short answer is usually fear. Taking concrete action towards something you want can push you out of your comfort zone. New and unexpected things are likely to happen, and you will push the limits of your mindset. The mind is lazy—it does not want to change unless it has to. Motion is a way for the mind to trick you into thinking that you are making progress towards your goal. This is only an illusion though. Many times, getting stuck on a goal is related to slipping from action into motion.
Transform self-judgement into curiosity. Taking action towards an ambitious goal can be scary, and it will likely activate your self-judgement. Falling short of your expectations or making mistakes are totally normal when doing new things. Often though, we are our own harshest critics. At the first sign of trouble your inner voice may shout “this is a terrible idea”, or “who are you kidding, you can’t really do this”. This not only creates resistance, but also makes taking action downright not fun. If you notice this dynamic, I challenge you to consider your goal in a different way. When taking action, pretend that you are a detective trying to solve a mystery. The whole purpose of taking action in this view is to stimulate resistance, and observe where it comes from. This perspective can help keep you in a curious state of mind, and it might even get you excited to take action.
