Do you ever feel like you are sitting on the sidelines while others around you are making great leaps of faith and finding their lives exciting, fulfilling and successful? Are you feeling like you don’t have the energy to move much less gain momentum toward your goals?

Life can be an uphill grind at times. However, the future belongs to those who take action today. Do you realise that successful people are not successful because they are better than you are? Simply put, some people are doing better because they do things differently. They do the right things right.

They have stopped running around in circles in their lives, repeating mistakes or continuing to do things that do not work. Did you know that success is predictable? The key to success is action.

If you are like most people today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new responsibilities keep rolling in like a flood. This can be paralysing. It can make you want to put your head in the sand.

Not only that but the stress and tension it causes can have a large impact on the relationships around you. All of this can cause you to lose your focus and, if you are not watchful, can hinder your momentum and motion. If you are going to achieve your goals and reach a successful outcome, you must keep moving forward.

So, how do you keep moving (or for that matter, start moving) when you feel stuck?

There is a quality or skill that you can develop that will impact your success more than any other. When motivation is low or is under developed, develop the ability to select your most important task, get it done and do it well. An average person who sets clear priorities and gets important tasks done quickly creates momentum. You’ll find that person running circles around the person who simply talks a lot about what they wish to accomplish. Failure to execute is one of the biggest hinderances to your success. My husband often says that there are a lot of people with great ideas floating around in their heads but they never act on them. Until you put motion (action) to the greatness inside of you, nothing happens.

I have been known to be a huge procrastinator. Thank the good Lord, I am making strides at overcoming this shortcoming BUT, seriously, when I am faced with a huge, overwhelming task that steals the joy out of my day…I am tempted to be that person of “no action” and hope it disappears before I have to face it. However, it never does! Never.

In fact, no matter what I do in my day, if there is an important task lurking in the background, nothing I do is fulfilling until I have it tackled and completed. It’s kind of like staring at a plate of beautiful food with a huge dollop of spinach staring back at me when I was a child. I knew that no matter how beautiful the steak tasted on my pallete, when I got to the spinach…it wasn’t going to be good. And at our house, we cleaned our plates so I knew that there was no leaving it sit there. We didn’t have a dog to eat it for me so it was going no where until I just took the plunge and ate it.

So, I always ate the most disgusting thing on my plate first. Get IT OUT OF THE WAY! Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day. I think I would have to agree with him there!

He went on to say that “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the ugliest one first.”

Your tasks are no different. The biggest, most important task that you are tempted to procrastinate is your “frog”. Tackle it first. Do it well. Do it to completion. Successful Completion of important tasks gives you a positive feeling. It makes you happy. You feel like a winner. No matter the size of the task, you will feel a sense of accomplishment, energy. enthusiasm, creativity and confidence. This will create momentum in your motion.

Rebuilding our business after catastrophe has been one of the hardest things we have done as a couple. We are on the road to success. Yet, once we attain our goal of a thriving business, there will be people who will say, “It’s easy for you because you are successful.” However, every successful person has had to do the hard yards -the tasks or things that they wish they didn’t have to do. I lived for three years in a small break room turned apartment in an abandoned building. It was my task the first thing every morning to address my attitude. I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I wanted to feel like success would never come. I wanted to cry and scream and blame. But for those three years, every morning, I got up, cleaned my little home and made it an enjoyable place to live. A strange thing happened when I did…we found contentment and the energy to keep moving forward. We kept moving, acting, working and overcoming. And you can too!

Your success in life and work will be determined by the types of habits you develop over time.

The habit of starting and completing important tasks pays immediate and continuous rewards. If you begin to practice this one habit, success is predictable…you will be on the fast track to success in no time.

What is your least favourite task? Can you eat your “frog” and make a difference in your ability to succeed?

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