How To CLOSE The GAP Between You & Your Dream Life

How To CLOSE The GAP Between You & Your Dream Life



Photo by Jonas Verstuyft

A lot of people are still hopeful this time of year about New Year’s Resolutions that they’ll never actually achieve.

Because — what is a New Year’s Resolution, anyway?

It’s simply a decision you’ve made to do or get something you don’t yet have. The decision part is easy. The getting part is where most people trip up.

So realize this:

The distance between where you are today and the life you want to be living… is equal to the space (or gap) between the decisions you make, and the actions you take.

Close the gap, and you are on your way!

For most people, the problem, challenge, or difficulty that they find themselves in — the only reason they’re not getting everything they want from the life they’re living — is NOT that they’re not making decisions about it. People are GOOD at making decisions.

The problem that they don’t know how to close the GAP:

The Gap Between The Decisions You're Making
And The Actions You Need To Take.

If you can move from the decision making process to the action-taking process — then you’ve come a long long way.

In fact, if you can do that you’ve come further than at least 95% of people, I’d say.

Even then, the gap won’t be 100% closed. But it sure as heck will be a lot further down the road than it would be if you were unable to connect your decisions to your actions. Because for most people, they start by making their decision as a desired outcome.

From there, they take themselves through a mental song-and-dance of 20 or 30 different scenarios about how that might happen.

They speculate about what would happen, could happen, should happen, or might happen…

Instead Of Just
Letting It Happen.

That is a real issue for most people. And it’s not your fault. Most of us were trained to think in this faulty way by the school system. But until you’re able to just focus in on the ONE thing you need to be doing next at all times… you can’t take action.

We all seem to have this idea when we’re planning to do something that you need to make a plan of action that has multiple steps in it all the way to completion. As if you need to know what every single milestone is for the goals you put in place. And you need to draft up a total business plan and know everything about how it’s going to operate before you put anything into motion…

Or you need to have your total workout plan, with all the supplements you think will get you into peak shape, before you’ve even tried any of it out.

But the truth is, for most goals you can set, that’s incredibly interruptive to taking the next step.

And it will stop you dead in your tracks.

You’ll never accomplish anything.

If you’re in a baseball game and the pitcher is about to swing the ball at you, you shouldn’t be focusing on how you’re going to run around third base yet.

You sure do need to know that if you DO end up going to third base — you’ll need to get home, because that’s how you score home runs. But you shouldn’t be worrying about how to get to third base before the pitcher hurls the ball at you. You need to be focusing on what’s next. So…

Here’s What Mastering Your
New Year’s Resolutions Is Really About:

(And this goes for any goal or decision you make throughout 2022, too).

How do you sequence out your thinking process so you’re thinking about the right things at the right moment and giving them the right attention when you need to?

The answer is FAR simpler than you think:

Knowing what THE NEXT STEP in the process is, is always the most important part at any given moment.

And it should always carry the highest level of your preference.

Whether it’s a New Year’s Resolution, a lifelong goal, or anything else — whenever you begin doing something, start with knowing where you’re going.

There are two very simple positions you have to know at all times:

First - recognize where you are. What’s going on right here right now? Where are you at this moment in time? What’s the sensory experience you’re having at this place in your life?

Second - where is it that you’re aiming to go? What do you actually want as an outcome? In order to know what the next step is, you always have to know where you’re going.

Once you have an idea of where you are and where you’re going, you can ask the third critical question — the only one you’ll need to know to achieve your goal:

WHAT’S NEXT?

Those two simple words might seem so obvious, it’s almost laughable, but the amount of people who would achieve their goals if they simply asked themselves that question more often is astounding.

The question “What’s Next?” Is the single key to filling the GAP.

You don’t need to know the whole plan. All you need to know is WHAT IS NEXT.

You want to constantly be asking yourself:

“From where I am, what would be the next step I could take that would allow me to get to where I want to go?”

And once you know that, then every step that will follow after it HAS to proceed from the step before it. It’s a law of nature.

So don’t worry about what’s after. Just go do what’s next.

That’s logical. It just makes sense. No one can argue with that. But not everyone thinks about it in this way. In fact, the school system has trained most people to think they need to have some grand scheme planned out before they do anything.

But most of the time, planning out a “grand scheme” is completely impossible. Because the next step you take will determine the step after that.

You will never even know what the second step will be until AFTER you take the first step.

You can never “plan” for the second step. And you can’t know what the third step will be until you finish the second step, either. Because after you take the first step, you’re in a brand new starting place you couldn’t have known about before you took that first step.

Get it?

Understand this:

Each Step You Take
Brings You To A NEW Starting Point.

That new starting point is not where you thought you were going to be when you were at the step before. The entire universe of possibilities, you could say, is RE-DEFINED every single time you take a new step, which is why you can never plan for what you don’t know about until you do it.

Now while you can certainly lay out a plan of action that has an intended sequence and structure to it - and you can lay out a plan that says “I know where I am, I know where I want to be going, and this seems to be the steps I need to take to get there”…

You need to remain and find a way to keep yourself OPEN to recognizing where you actually wind up after you take each step.

That part is crucial.

Then, allow yourself the freedom to re-set and re-form what the step after that will be once you’ve taken that first bit of action.

Which may not be the step you thought it was going to be. In fact, it probably won’t.

As You Go Through That Process,
You May Discover Two Things:

One — the end point you thought you were getting to, is now NOT where you actually wound up being.

Two — and more importantly — the end point you thought you were getting to, is no longer where you WANT to wind up by taking the steps that are to follow.

And that’s perfectly okay. That’s the process. It’s actually quite beautiful — IF you can let it happen.

By taking the step, information that was not available to you just a moment before, is now available to you. And that new information may re-structure, and even totally change the entire idea of what it is you thought you wanted. And it may be something that you couldn’t even conceive of before taking that step…

Something that’s so much better, so much more powerful, and so much more compelling to you than you could have even understood before you took the step that you just completed.

That’s why action is truly the key.

So get your third grade teacher out of your head telling you the entire plan needs to be in place before you act on it.

And instead, simply ask yourself WHAT’S NEXT?

I personally promise that as long as you keep asking yourself that question, you will go farther and achieve more success than any overly-planned itinerary you may want to cling to.

Finally — some people have a certain anxiety about not knowing the WHOLE plan before they do anything.

And I get that. As humans, we like to feel certainty. And when there’s uncertainty about what’s ahead, we can freak out a little…

But what if instead, you experienced that uncertainty as excitement? As if you were about to step on a roller coaster?

I invite you to try on that paradigm as you dive into your goals. Not knowing where your goals will take you is actually part of the fun.

So simply do what’s next, then sit back and enjoy the ride. No matter what happens, you’ll be thrilled with where it will take you.


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