Blink and it’s over. Don’t wait

The whistle blows before you’re ready. Blink and your opportunity has passed — unless you listen and make a plan for action.

As long as you know.

If you are happy with your life, don’t let me rain on your parade. Maybe you feel comfortable letting time slip through your hands like water through a sieve; maybe you are satisfied with the way things are going. If so, I won’t try to stop you.

But if you are less than content with the way you feel at the end of the day, come on in for a minute and let’s think about this.

Check it tonight.

The best time to check your “temperature” is at night. That’s when the voice whispers in your ear about how you’re doing. Listen to that voice. It’s trying to tell you something important.

If what you hear concerns you; maybe even leaves you shaken a little, then you may want to re-evaluate what you are doing and with what passion and progress.

Write something down. Otherwise, you blink and the moment has passed. Don’t worry too much about what you write, just write. For example: you could write: “I don’t like the way work went today.” Or, “She doesn’t respect me.” Anything, really, that reflects what you noticed when you took your emotional temperature.

Check it again in the morning.

So let’s say you wrote something down last night. The first thing you want to do in the morning is to look at what you wrote last night.

Take a minute to analyze what you wrote. (Why did I write that? Oh, yeah. At work yesterday I felt disrepected in the meeting). What actually happened? Recall the scene behind what you wrote.

Make a plan for action.

It’s what you leave undone that undoes you. You’ve heard how bad it is for your body to sit too much during the day, how hard it is on your heart. The same is true of your emotional side. If you just sit there when something is wrong, you blink and the opportunity to do  something about it has evaded you again.

So make a plan to do something about it. Don’t wait for days or weeks, stewing. Let’s continue from the example above: at night you wrote down, “I don’t like the way work went today.” In the morning you analyzed that statement and remembered that what you didn’t like about work yesterday was that you were disrespected in the meeting. So now, it’s time for action.

One step at a time.

When you do something, remember: what you do can be something small. Some reasonable next step. So for example, if you were disrespected in the meeting yesterday, do something (anything) about that. You could resolve to be more assertive in the next meeting, or you could say something to the person who disrespected you. You could decide it didn’t even really matter, and say to yourself, “Puh. Grow up.” The point is: take some step of conscious action.

The takeaway:

Don’t wait. Grab the moments of your life — especially the ones that bring you down — and let your discontent inspire action.

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I can help you seize the day before you blink and it’s too late.