Hey, welcome to Happy Productive 5 and in this episode let’s dive into the kind of ACTION you are taking.
If you’ve ever studied Law of Attraction you know the basic principles are to get clear on what you want and then start taking action to get it.
However, I think there can be a LOT of confusion out there on the action piece of this…
Today I’m going deeper to bring more awareness to the kinds of action you can take plus what works and what doesn’t.
When you know what kind of action you are taking it can really help you figure out why you are or are not getting the kind of results you want.
Listen in while we break down action into three types…
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
The right kind of action to be taking to meet your goals
The difference between Massive, Passive, and Reactive action
Stop killing yourself with the wrong kind of daily action
FEATURED ON THE SHOW
Making Your Goals Inevitable Workshop
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hey, Hey everyone, and welcome to episode number five of five, you guys have done this five times, and it’s so much fun I have to tell you. So welcome to episode number five of happy productive. Today we want to dive into what kind of action that you’re taking. Now, if you’ve ever studied the law of attraction, you know that the basic principles are get clear on what you want and then start taking action to get it.
But I know that there can be a lot of confusion out there on the actual action piece of this. And if you’re thinking that all I have to do is sit around and think about what I want, and it’ll just magically come to me and I don’t have to get off my ass and do anything. Again, lots of confusion out there because there is a very, very important action piece to all of this. And that’s why I want to go deeper on it today and start to bring some awareness to the kinds of action that you’re either taking or maybe you’re not taking.
Because when you know what kind of action you’re taking, it can really help you to figure out why you’re getting or maybe you’re not getting the kinds of results that you really want. So let’s break it down into three different types of action.
We’ve got massive, we’ve got passive, and we’ve got reactive. Massive action is taking an action until you get a desired result. That means that you don’t stop after you try once or you try twice and you fail, right? It means that you are committed to figuring it out and willing to put yourself out there. Then it could be like over and over and over again. If you’re using a best planner ever you guys know this would be our “A” task for the day.
Now if you’re new to the planner, this might sound a little bit weird, like what the heck are they talking about? But if you use a planner, you’re going to know exactly what I’m talking about here. In the best planner ever, instead of just working from a massive to do list each day, which is the way I used to work before I created the planner.
Instead, what we do is inside the planner on the to do list, it’s actually organized by A, B, C and D, and A is our massive action for the day. It doesn’t mean that it takes three hours a day, it can literally be a 5- or 10-minute thing, but it’s a step that you take that requires you to push outside your comfort zone. It could be a step that maybe you might otherwise procrastinate, it’s often really easy to make excuses around our A tasks, because they’re things that might scare us a little bit. It could be pitching that client, who scares you and you’re like, oh, what if I fail or attending a networking meeting that maybe scares you a little bit because “Ah, what am I going to say?” Or How am I going to be? How are people going to think of me, okay, whatever that kind of stuff is.
Maybe it’s accepting a public speaking opportunity. And that scares you too, right? Any of these things that might scare you a little bit. But you know, in your heart, it would get you closer, if you did it, to achieving a soul goal. Now, what’s a soul goal? This is not a regular goal. A soul goal is one that pulls you forward. That’s very different than most of the goals that we’re trying to achieve these days where we’re pushing and struggling and grinding away.
It’s almost like trying to push a car that is running out of gas and it’s stuck on the road, but you’re like, by golly, I’m going to get there and you just have to push this car to get to where you want to go. But when you’re pursuing soul goals, your car never runs out of gas and teaching soul goals is one other things I’m going to be talking about in my upcoming workshop, Making Your Goals Inevitable. If you want to learn more about this, visit my websites either bestplannerever.com or JenniferDawncoaching.com and just click workshops at the top, and you can find “Making Your Goals Inevitable.”
Back to massive action. Massive action is that action that you commit to take until you get the results that you’re after. And this is where a lot of that confusion comes in. Because so many people think that they’re taking massive action, but what they’re really doing is taking one of the other types. So next, let’s talk about passive action. Passive action is when you’re consuming, okay? Think of it like this with massive, massive action you’re creating, you’re out there, you’re doing things. It’s creating something new in the world. With passive action you’re consuming.
You’re reading a book, you’re taking a personal growth course, you’re attending a class. You’re listening to this episode of happy productive, right? Anything to learn and grow, which is awesome. It’s awesome. You guys, I love passive action because I love learning new things. I love growing, I love expanding my skill set. And frankly, I couldn’t do what I do, at least not do it well, if I wasn’t always learning new things. However, passive action will not get you to where you want to be all by itself.
It’s super easy to sit back and learn, right? We’re learning. A lot of people will justify the learning that they’re doing and it’s like, well, hey, look at all this learning that I’m doing. Isn’t this enough to get me the results that I want? Well, it isn’t. When you’re just making an excuse and saying “I learned all of this stuff and nothing changed for me.” It puts yourself back into that victim stage: “Woe is me, I work so hard to learn all this stuff and I still didn’t get what I wanted.”
You didn’t get what you wanted because you didn’t take massive action. You didn’t commit to keep going despite the obstacles. Think about it like this for a second. Let’s say that you want to go to the grocery store, you get in your car and you start driving. While you’re driving, you hit a red light. When you hit the red light, you don’t say “oh my god, I’m a total failure. See, I told you I could do it.” “See how awful I am as a human being.” You don’t turn around and go back home.
Because you know that red lights are just part of the process and traffic that you’re going to hit is just part of the process. In life, when we’re out there trying to achieve something what will happen is, we think we’re taking massive action, but we hit that red light, and we’re just like, Okay, that’s it. I’m done. It didn’t work for me. But if you think about it, like a trip to the grocery store, you know that red lights and traffic are just part the process and guess what? So is taking massive action.
Now in business, this is especially true. I see this with my coaching clients. My clients will come in and they want to learn about all kinds of different things. They want to learn about email marketing, or paid advertising, or how do I build a great team? Or how can they be more productive? Maybe they’ve even invested some time learning about these things, which is awesome. That’s passive action. Maybe they’ve tried it a few times, once or twice, sometimes not at all.
But sometimes they’ve tried a few times, they didn’t get the results that they wanted. So, they give up. Then they come to coaching and they want me to fix their problems. But here’s the deal. When you transfer ownership of a problem to someone else, you lose your power. This is still just taking passive action, right? Because we want to sit back and we want to let somebody else figure it out for us, but it usually doesn’t work.
The clients who come to me, and they are the most successful and I have amazing successful clients, right? They do take the passive action to learn to grow to be coached. That’s an important part of the process. But they retain responsibility for their own success. They act upon what they’ve learned. They get out there, they start taking massive action, they see what works, they see what doesn’t, they learn from their failures, and they try again. It’s a process, and it’s beautiful, and it’s fun, and it’s rewarding when you go into it knowing and understanding the different types of action that are required of you.
I mentioned three categories. The third one is reactive action. This is action that you’re taking because you’re reacting to something. Often, not all the time, but often it’s going to be an emotion and it’s an uncomfortable one. It’s super easy to confuse this with massive and passive action. Let’s say that you have a challenge that’s going on in your life, your business is failing, you’re losing money, you’re going through a divorce, your teenager is off the rails. Something big, something upsetting that you don’t want to deal with.
Instead, you throw yourself into action. I did this for years, you guys, I’m speaking from experience and it was so easy to justify working myself into the ground. Look at me, I’m driven. Look at me, I’m meeting a goal. Look at me, I’m growing my business, right? But I was so busy distracting myself from all the stuff going on in my personal life that I didn’t want to deal with.
I was so busy, I didn’t have to deal with it. That’s reactive action. Because I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to deal with the emotions of it. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Because we’re not taught how to process and deal with our emotions. We’re not taught how to break apart our thinking. We’re not taught how to do these things.
I just didn’t know how to deal with all of this stuff. Let’s face it, as human beings, it’s almost like we’d rather die than have to feel an uncomfortable emotion. We’ll just do anything. We’ll go to any end to be able to avoid that. But this is a big reason why I want to be so clear here on the different kinds of actions because if you realize that you’re in a reactive state, you’re going to be working a lot harder than you need to be.
When we talk about daily productivity, this is why we want to start asking this question “What kind of action am I taking today? Is it massive action where I’m willing to fail? I know it’s part of the process. But I’m going to keep going until I get the results I want. I’m keeping my power, I’m going to figure it out.” That’s massive action. Or am I taking passive action? Where I’m consuming and it’s not a bad thing, but we want to be clear on the balance between massive and passive.
Sometimes I am consuming, but we don’t want to only be in a state of consuming and that passive action and think that that’s enough to get us there, because it’s not. Or when we look at our daily productivity, am I in reactive action? Am I distracting myself from something I don’t want to deal with so I’m just going to work harder? That’s feeding your ego guys. I did that for years. Look at how important I am because I’m so busy and all I was doing was feeding my ego. I don’t do that anymore and it’s opened up so much space in my life.
Am I living in fear and worrying about something which is completely outside of my control? Reactive action almost always leads to exhaustion, burnout, depression, all of those things. If you’re suffering from any of these and you’re sitting around asking yourself “What the hell? I’ve taken all this action, and all I got from it was being super burned out.” Well, this is why we want to take a look and ask ourselves “Wait a second. What kind of action am I taking each day?” That’s why I really wanted to dive in deeper, so you can start asking yourself, “Well, what kind of action am I taking today?”
It’s funny. There’s a lot of people out there that will talk about how you’ve got to take action because I a lot of people don’t take action. I was the opposite of that. I was taking so much action. Getting myself to work was never a problem. But I found that because I was not taking the right kind of action, that’s where the exhaustion and the burnout and the Depression were really coming from because I was just distracting myself or patting my ego. I don’t want that for any of you. I have now learned, and I now teach that when you’re being pulled each day by your soul goals, that action comes from a place of love.
The reactive stuff often is coming from a different place. It’s coming from fear and some other emotions. The thing I most want you to take away from this today is to just take a look at your day and simply start asking yourself, Well, what kind of action am I taking today? If I’m not taking action, this would be reactive because there’s something I don’t want to deal with. So I’m just going to do nothing or I’m going to check out with TV or social media, alcohol, drugs, all those things. That’s not taking action because we don’t want to deal with the emotions or whatever’s going on with it.
If I’m killing myself, but I’m not really going anywhere that’s feeling good. Guess what? That’s probably also reactive action. I did this for years. I’d kill myself to meet a goal and be happy for five seconds. Then it’s on to the next goal because I was attaching my happiness to the goal. Big no no. Big no no. That also counts as reactive action. If I’m learning and growing, and it feels great, that’s passive, and that’s great. We need that passive action. However, if you’re hiding or it’s like, hey, what am I doing today? Well, I’m hiding behind another book or course or I’m making excuses as to why I just can’t start doing this yet. Perfectionists out there, you know who you are, right? There’s always some reason why you just can’t get started. That is, again, reactive action because you’re avoiding that doing because you don’t want to fail or you don’t want to feel some negative emotion if it’s not perfect the first time.
If you’re taking steps forward, it doesn’t matter how small they are, right? But they put yourself out there. And these could be steps where maybe you’ve done it before you’ve tried, you failed, but you’re going to keep going until you figure it out. That’s massive action. That’s massive action. That’s the action that we take that gets us the results that we want, if we keep going. We must remember that failure is an important part of that process. Because of course, you’re learning as you go.
I have to tell you guys, it’s massive action on your soul goals that is so much damn fun. It’s almost hard to put it into words how good massive action on your soul goals feels. If you want to learn more about how to do this, then come on down to my workshop “Making Your Goals Inevitable”. You can find out information on it from bestplannerever.com or jenniferdawncoaching.com and just click workshops at the top. While you’re there, I’d also love to invite you to check out my other coaching programs.
Goal Achievers is my life coaching program and Inner Circle is my business coaching program. That’s it for today. I really hope that as you go through the day, you’ll consider what kind of action you’re taking: massive, passive or reactive. Thanks so much. Get out there and have a Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer