Mobilizing Opportunity: Open a New Door

Monday’s Mobilizing Opportunity

What new door could you open this week?

• Where could that opened door lead? 
• What new possibilities might emerge if you were to open that door?
• Who do you need to connect with or reconnect with in order to open that door?
• What might be the benefit of opening that new door?
• What small steps could you take to open that door this week?

Celebrate & Do A Happy Dance!

You’ve done it! You’ve reached a goal or made a change in your life! You’ve accomplished what you set out to do and you did it! Way to go! Now, make sure you acknowledge your wins and accomplishments no matter how big or how small. Then find an empowering way to celebrate your accomplishment. Do a happy dance!

Journal it. Mindmap it. Document it. That way you’ll remember your success story down the road. Try to get clear on your secret to success. Identify your best practices so you can leverage those for future personal and professional change initiatives. When you do this, you’ve got a sustainable change roadmap that will work for you over and over again.

Then toot your own horn by letting your allies and others know that you reached your goal. They’ll want to do a happy dance for you, too!

Celebration and acknowledgement reinforces the positive changes you’ve made and sets you up for being able to successfully make those changes more sustainable.

You grow, girl!

Find Allies

Research consistently shows that one of the keys to making lasting change is having support. A true support team encourages our growth and forward movement, helps us to appreciate our progress and celebrates our successes. 

Take a moment to identify the people who truly encourage your personal and professional growth. Is it a close friend, a family member, a spouse or partner, a colleague, a mentor, a coach, a boss or a small group of individuals who are all working toward a similar goal? Would you benefit from hiring someone who has a special expertise and who can provide you with the kind of support you seek, such as a certified coach or a personal trainer?

The key is to create a Circle of Support that consists of people who are committed to providing you with positive and encouraging support, so that you can effectively move forward with your goals and intentions. Your change allies may be wayshowers who have walked a similar path before you and who are able to serve as an inspirational mentor. Or your change ally may be someone who is simply a dedicated advocate for your personal and professional growth and overall well-being. Or there may be someone you know who is walking the same change path that you are and who wants a change ally buddy for the journey ahead.

Enlist a Change Ally Buddy

Consider developing a mutual support arrangement with someone who is also committed to making positive and lasting changes in their life and career. In order to make this work, both buddies need to commit to giving and receiving authentic, growth-centric support. And likewise, a commitment needs to be made to not throw energy-draining pity parties as those will only serve to take you both off course. Make sure that you and your change ally set aside time to acknowledge and celebrate your learning, growth and accomplishments along the way.

Boulders and Underlying Commitments

Making changes in our lives, our work or our business can be a journey in and of itself. It takes a series of baby steps to reach our goal and to truly be able to sustain the desired change over time. And along the path of change, we are likely to encounter some unexpected obstacles or boulders. 

The majority of the obstacles or boulders that we find on our path of change are self-made. We put them in our way, although we often don’t want to admit that. These boulders can take the form of: actions, emotions, behaviors or thinking. Boulders and obstacles like these can keep our world small and get in the way of reaching our goals and manifesting our true intentions. Self-perceived boulders and underlying commitments get in the way of being conscious entrepreneurs.

What We Let Get In The Way

What do we let get in our way? Plenty! The list of obstacles and roadblocks can be long, especially for entrepreneurial women, and can include: our own limiting beliefs about ourselves, our negative self-talk, shoulds and cants, lies we tell ourselves, our quest for perfectionism, our fears, and more.

These boulders frequently show up as an underlying commitment that we hold (consciously or unconsciously) and that we put in the way of our own forward moving progress. Chances are our underlying commitments have been serving up internal roadblocks and obstacles in a similar pattern for years.

One more thing you’ll want to know about these internal roadblocks, most of these boulders exist only in one place…our imagination! We engrain them in our personal belief system and falsely label them as real or true. But they aren’t! The key eliminating many road blocks is to become a good detective who is able to discern the truth from fiction.

What Is Getting In Your Way?

• So what is getting in the way of you making the changes you want to make in your business, career or life?
• What are you really committed to? How many of your obstacles and boulders are imagined?
• What boulders can you prove to be 100% real and true?
• Are you more committed to clinging to these outdated and limiting beliefs than you are to moving forward and achieving what you set out to accomplish? 

Today, take a baby step of looking at just one of the boulders along your path. Apply gentle self-compassion as you look to see what is underlying your desired changes, commitments, goals and intentions.

Planning To Take Action

Believe it or not the act of planning and taking action steps is easy. No really, it is!! The hard work is saying that we want something to happen in our lives or work and then not doing anything about it day after day after day! That is what really drains our energy and keeps us from achieving our goals and manifesting our intentions.

I once heard someone describe it this way: “If something is hard, you probably haven’t started yet!” And they were right! We usually complain the most about the actions we have yet to take. Once we shift our perception of the situation or task at hand and begin to take action, it usually starts to seem less difficult or daunting.

The key is just to start: take action! And then, sustain the momentum by taking small steps every day.

Nike got it right with their classic campaign tagline of “Just Do It.”