Everyone wants to have an extraordinary life! It’s wired into our brains to want to do better and be better. But, a big population of the world isn’t satisfied with the life that they are living. So, what’s stopping everyone from living extraordinarily?
A lot of it has to do with one very simple phrase: “but I’ve never done it before.” How many times has this crossed your mind when you come up with a goal to work towards? Does your brain come up with all the times you’ve tried and it hasn’t worked out? Have you given up before you even put in an honest effort because you don’t even know where to start?
You can be successful moving forward no matter what you’ve done before!
If you can recall yourself thinking something along the lines of, “but I’ve never done that before,” you are probably operating through a past-focused lens. Being past focused means that you use evidence from all of your past experiences to determine what you are capable of in the future.
When you focus on your past to create your future, you are not allowing yourself to grow. Having never done something before should never be a reason to determine what your future looks like. The reason why we make goals and try new things is to evolve as a person and to expand our experiences of life.
Brooke Castillo, founder of The Life Coach School, says it best: “Your past success is not what determines your future success. Your current thinking is what determines your future success, not your past actions.”
The solution is to be future-focused. Instead of looking to the past to decide what you are capable of doing, which is very restrictive, you must look to the future. Where will you be in five years…a year…six months? When you decide what you want your future to look like, you can work backwards from there. By doing this, you actively build your future into something great.
For example, perhaps in six months you want your business to be launched. What habits will you have in the future as a business owner? Habits take time, therefore you need to start now to become the person you will be then. What new skills do you need to learn in the six months before you launch? Start researching now to be an expert at them by the time the end of the six months rolls around. And it doesn’t matter if you haven’t done it before, because in the future that you’re building, you will have done it and you will have been successful!
Children are better at this than adults. When a child wants to learn how to ride a bike, they’ve never done it before and it is a completely foreign skill. Maybe the last time they tried they crashed. But they are determined, and they’ve decided that in the future they will be able to ride a bike! They let themselves fail and they pick themselves up until one day it’s second nature, because it doesn’t matter if they’ve never done it, they know that one day they will be able to, and that success in the future starts with their best effort now.
The next time you have a thought along the lines of, “ I don’t know how to do that,” or “I’ve never done that before,” or even “I tried before and it didn’t work,” be quick in replacing the thought. Instead, try thinking, “what do I need to do to become the person I want to be,” or, “I’ve never tried it before so I better start figuring it out!”
Extraordinary things await!