How to stop making the same mistakes: evaluate & adjust

In order to spend your time the way you want, one of the most important skills you can learn is how to evaluate and adjust.

This allows you to stop making the same mistakes over and over again & it helps you stop feeling stuck. This one skill of evaluating and adjusting is what will create not only a lot of progress in a short amount of time, but also a lot of confidence and self-assuredness.

You'll stop looking outside of you for answers because you'll know how to find your own answers. Your own answers are always the best answers.

It's the difference between ordering pants online (a total crap shoot) and having pants created and tailored to fit you.

There only 4 steps to evaluate:

1st: Compare your plan to what you actually did (or didn't do) - pick ONE thing. The thing that bothers you the most that you didn't do it.

(If you don't have a plan, there really isn't much to evaluate. You need a plan first.)

2nd: Get curious about the discrepancies between your plan and the thing you didn't do:

This ONLY works from curiosity. If you're judging yourself you'll find only terrible and useless answers like:

- I don't know what's wrong with me
- I don't know why I do this
- I just can't handle it

That gives you nothing to go on because you think YOU are the problem. You are not the problem. Your THOUGHTS are.

Thoughts like:

- Ugh, forget it.
- It's too hard
- It doesn't matter

These thoughts create emotions of resignation and hopelessness. And those emotions are NOT fuel for doing the things you want to do. These thoughts and feelings are the ACTUAL problem. Yay! You found them!

(Very important aside: the way you plan it may very well be adding to the difficulty factor. When it doubt, make how you planned that one thing even smaller, even easier, and even more specific. Make sure it's a VERY small part of the whole. It should not have multiple steps. If it does, bring your plan back down to ONE step.)

3rd: The next step is to identify when those thoughts and feelings are cropping up. What time of day? With what activities? In what company?

Just this awareness can be super helpful. Because when you're expecting those thoughts and feelings, you're going to be a lot less likely to believe them.

4th: What do you want to counter those thoughts and feelings with when they come up?

You'll be tempted to swing too far the other way and think you need something extreme like, I love doing this! It's so easy!

Likely that's WAY too far of a leap. My favorite questions to find a more useful thought are:

- What would allow me to be willing to do this?
- How could I feel more willing?
- How could I?
- What do I need most?
- What would make it easier?

Pick one thought that elicits a more useful emotion. You'll know if a thought "works" if you feel a change in your body and/or you have the desire to get up and do something.

& there you have it! Now you know exactly how to evaluate and adjust.

If you loved this and you want to take this work deeper & master this process so you know exactly what to do when you find yourself procrastinating or feeling stuck, this is the work I do with my clients. We look at your mindset AND how you're planning and I help you make tweaks to both so follow through becomes damn near effortless. To see if this is a good fit for you, I want to invite you to schedule a consult here.