START! AND DON’T STOP

After spending 28 years as a High School and Elementary School Band Director who had thousands of activities with his students, I heard just about every excuse imaginable.  My favorite was “anticipated death of a relative.”  The relative was fine, go figure. Most all of my students (and parents) excuses were made to keep them in their comfort zone and prevent them from advancing forward.  If that sounds counter intuitive to you…it is!  But many of us make these backward decisions every day.

When I taught elementary school,  at the beginning of the 4th grade school year, students would select an instrument to learn to play.  It was an exciting time of discovery for most.  However, there were always a few who after one or two weeks would declare that “they are not good at playing and instrument” and quit.  They stopped before they ever got started.  I wish I could say it wasn’t heartbreaking every time it happened, but it was.  Not because they were quitting their instrument, but because I knew they were forming a life-long habit of giving up too easily.  I wondered how many of their dreams and goals in life would stay just that, a dream.  What’s worse, their parents were giving them the permission and even assisting them in forming that life-long habit and belief.  Any skill, business, success model, achievement, goal, or task takes time to come to fruition.

Maybe you have given up on your dreams before you ever got started.  Maybe you know others who have. Worse, maybe you haven’t realized that you are that person.    Here is my short list of things to START! AND DON’T STOP.  (If you didn’t read my blog post from 2 weeks ago about things you should STOP before your start, click here and read that first)

Start finishing everything you start.

Start to develop daily habits that move you closer to your target every day.

Start working one project at a time, it will make it easier to finish.

Start to DREAM BIG again!

Start setting smaller benchmarks along your path to that really BIG DREAM.

Start understanding that EVERYTHING takes work and time to accomplish; especially if it requites new learning.

Start to expect a learning curve in anything you do.

Start reading positive books and listening to positive audios.

Start hanging around influential, motivated, inspiring people.

Start expecting more from yourself and those around you.

Start writing down your goals.

Start to develop a new network of connections.  (Face to face connections, not through Facebook or LinkedIn.

Start to open your mind to new possibilities.)

Start doing something you always wanted to do, but were too afraid of.

Bearj Jehanian is a Maximum Potential Speaker and Trainer.  Through a combination of inspiration and online tools, Bearj inspires his audiences to build a foundation of belief, to support a decision to act on any idea and bring it to completion. Believe, Decide, Act.  You can find out more about Bearj here.