I’m in the early stages of my new business and much of my activity is business building, in other words creating connections, networking, clarifying niches, building a website, setting up systems and lots of other time consuming things. While I was cleaning up my files the other day (like the home that gets very clean when you’re studying I was looking for something to distract me I think!), I came across an article I thought was such a great message, so timely and relevant, and so I wanted to share parts of it with you. It’s an article by TC Cummings, an ex Navy Seal and a mentor and coach for the Jim Rohn coaching program. He says you’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.
“We can only grow to the extent that we envision ourselves. Unless our inner representation grows as fast as our external growth, we will actually hold ourselves back from lasting success.
Do you know anyone who has dramatically lost weight with great joy only to revert to his or her old habits and weight?
Do you know people who have earned the money they really deserve only to squander it away and regress to their former income?
Leaping from crawling to running sets us up for a painful fall. We don’t achieve true personal growth, and because we find ourselves back at square one we may become disgruntled and distrustful of the process, often blaming anyone and anything but ourselves.
If you want to change, you must do the work. Go back to basics. In football, professionals earning millions of dollars annually practice the most basic drills throughout the season. If you make millions of dollars consistently, most likely it’s because you go back to the basics of budgeting, saving and investing consistently.”
There are lots of messages in here but the key one for me is to discipline myself to do the appropriate things for the stage I’m at. TC Cummings calls it crawling before you can walk but I call it building the foundations before you decorate the house. Note to self “remember that!”
