042 | You Have to Take Action

We talk a lot about being in the right mindset to reach our goals. This is absolutely an important part of the process, but we can’t neglect the action piece.

As a lawyer, you probably spend way too much time preparing before you actually do a thing. (I know it’s not just me…)

If you find yourself thinking, researching, and preparing more than doing, this episode is for you. We dive into some of the reasons we often hesitate to take action and a couple of tips to help you move forward.

Lightly edited transcript appears after the show notes.

 Topics Discussed

• the importance of taking action
• why we don’t take action
• what we can do to take action

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Lightly Edited Transcript

Hey friend! Welcome back to the show.

How are you? I hope you are doing well.

So I’m super excited for our topic this week, which is all about taking action. You know we talked last week about mindset and specifically the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

With the fixed mindset, you believe that your skills are fixed, right. They’re set from birth, and you can’t take any effort or make any effort to change anything.

The growth mindset you believe that you can learn how to do things better. You can learn new skills, and so your effort will actually change things.

But even as important as mindset is, right—mindset is super important. We’ve talked about your money mindset, your beliefs about what you can do, your self-concept, right, what you believe is possible. The story that you tell yourself about yourself. All of that is important, but without action, all of that means nothing.

So you can’t, you know, just believe that you can do it, and then sit by and wait for it to happen, or, you know manifest your way to the results you want, or just believe really hard and then it’ll happen, right. You can’t just pray, and then give it over to God and sit by and do nothing, and we’ll talk more about that.

But you won’t get anywhere without taking action, and so we’re going to talk more about that today.

Why don’t we take action?

The first is we get caught up in the preparation and research, and as lawyers, we know we can research some stuff, right? And we can prepare. I know I’m not the only one that has all the notes and like 30 tabs open on my internet with things that I’m researching.

But the thing is we tell ourselves that we don’t know something. And so then we go through and we’re researching, and we’re looking up the best way to do it, and we’re going back and forth on this expert says this and that expert says that, and I’ve got all of my notes and my files and my stickies and all of that right.

But you can research all the things and know what to do, but knowing is not enough. You won’t really understand until you start doing. You have to put your knowledge to action.

It’s impossible to know all the answers before you get started, as much as we would love to believe that we could find all the answers. You just can’t.

So you’ve done enough research. Take the next best step, just take a step right? Even if you don’t know that it’s the next, the next best step, just take a step.

Clarity comes in the doing. Maybe you don’t know every single thing that you have to do, but just do what you do know. Right, do the thing that you know comes next, and then from there, it’ll be clearer what the next steps are after that.

Another reason why we don’t take action is, we tell ourselves that we’re waiting for the right time. The “right time,” right?

There’s no such thing as the right time for anything that you want to do. There’s only the time that you decide.

I think back to when my husband and I were starting our family, and you know I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t, you know, whatever, like, oh I don’t know if it’s the right time.

There’s no right time to have a baby. You just decide when you’re going to have the baby, and go for it, right? I wouldn’t have felt more ready if we had waited more or whatever.

So, the same is true with other areas of your life, as well. There is no right time. It’s just the time that you decide.

Circumstances will always come up. The fear will always be there. The doubt, the uncertainty, right, all of these feelings that you’re trying to avoid thinking that it’s not the right time.

No, people who are successful, who achieve the things that they want in life, do it in spite of those feelings. They feel the feelings and they do it anyway.

I want to offer that you don’t wait for the right time because it’s never going to come.

And for my fellow Christians out there I want to offer that sometimes this shows up as waiting on the Lord. We don’t necessarily say we’re waiting for the right time. We say we’re waiting on the Lord.

Yes, we have to do things in the Lord’s time, but some of us want to pray about every single thing and get confirmation on every single step instead of just taking action.

I think that comes from fear, right. Sometimes we dress up our fear as faith. And so, instead of feeling uncomfortable feeling that fear and moving forward anyway, we say well we’re just waiting on the Lord.

What are you doing in that waiting? How are you showing up? My coach always says, “God knows what you’re waiting on when he sees what you’re working on.”

So don’t use your faith as an excuse to not take action because you’re afraid, and don’t use waiting for the right time, as an excuse not to take action.

That fear is still going to be there, that doubt is still going to be there. Feel those things, and do it anyway.

What can we do to take action?

The first is make a decision. We’ve talked before about how spinning in indecision is really unproductive. It doesn’t move us forward.

Rather than spinning and preparing more and researching more, and going back and forth on whether this is the best way to do it, why don’t you just make a decision and do it?

When you make that decision, when you do the thing, then you can evaluate, right? You see how things turned out, and you can decide if you want to keep going that way, or if you want to pivot and do one of the other things.

But you’ll never get that feedback, if you don’t just take the action in the first place. So that’s first.

The second is seek help. There is nothing wrong with getting support when we need it.

Sometimes action looks like getting help. It could be delegating or outsourcing things that you don’t specifically have to be the one to do.

That has come up a few times in my life, with, you know, delegating things to staff or more junior attorneys at work. I remember when I was transitioning from being a junior associate to a mid-level associate and trying to figure out that balance of how to delegate and how to supervise.

But I remember one time in particular we had, like, eight different office actions. And for those who don’t practice trademark law an office action is just where the trademark office has, you know, asked for some changes to a trademark application or has some objections to it.

But we had eight different ones for this group of applications, and I had those things sitting on my desk for weeks because I was like oh I don’t have time to do this or I don’t feel like doing this or whatever.

And at one point I was like well why do I have to be the one to do all of this by myself, and I split them up among some junior associates and had them take the first pass at drafting the responses, and then I reviewed it and that way the thing actually got done.

The partner was really pleased with the speed with which they got done, and I wasn’t taking it all on by myself.

A lot of times we need support to go to the next level in different things that we’re doing so I mentioned before about when I was transitioning to being a mom of two and just feeling like I was failing in all areas of life, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t know how to get back into my groove the second time around. And I reached out to a therapist who helped me work through all of that.

The same is true with my business where I had been coaching friends and colleagues, and I started feeling this tug back in 2019 that I wanted to do something on a broader scale to help more people, but I didn’t know how to do that.

I had my blog, but I didn’t know anything about telling people what I was doing, right. I didn’t know how to get the word out how to market, and so I reached out to a coach to help me.

In juggling the business with my legal practice, my family, you know, all of the other responsibilities in the pandemic for way longer than I ever thought I would be, I’ve also hired an assistant to help me.

So you know, just looking at things that you want to take action on or you need to take action on, but you need support in order to take that action, don’t be afraid to ask for that support.

Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s okay. Sometimes the next best step is to reach out for help.

And so I just want to offer that there’s no shame in doing that, and many times we will spin and not take action because we won’t reach out for that help.

So the moral of the story is, take action. Don’t just sit back and keep researching and keep preparing and keep thinking about all the things.

There’s this great quote that’s been making the rounds on social media for a while now, but it’s something to the effect of, “Don’t be upset with the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do.”

How often do we do that? Where we think about things that we want to do, that it would be nice to do, but then we don’t take action on it and then we’re upset when we’re in the same place a year later, five years later, when we haven’t made progress on the goals that we say that we want?

Don’t let that be you. Take the action. Do the next step. Do the next thing that you know to do, and then go from there.

And if you need help with taking action in your money specifically, I am a coach. I can help you, so head to rhothomas.com/coaching, and let’s set up a call to chat about how I can help.

So I hope that blesses you. Please come on over to our private Facebook community, The Wealthyesque Community. Let’s talk more about taking action. You can find us at rhothomas.com/community.

If you got value from the show, please share with a friend. Please subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening on. Leave a review. Those reviews really help other people to find the show.

If you want to connect with me on social media, my handle is @iamrhothomas. I’m most often on Instagram, but I’m on a few other places, as well.

And just thank you for being here. I really appreciate your support. I am so glad to spend this time with you, and I hope that you will come back.

So friend as we close out, I pray that you will take a look at your life and any places where you are not taking action, and you know you need to be.

I pray that you will take the next best step, do what you know you need to do to move toward the goals that you have for your life.

And as always, I pray that you continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.