Advice for Figuring Out Your Next Step
Hey friends! Today I am giving a pep talk to the babes who need a little bit of a push when it comes to figuring out their next step. Let’s chat about some mindset adjustments you can make to help you get unstuck and start taking action toward your dreams, okay?
So you’ve got the dream - you know what you want to do and you are STOKED about it...yay! Seriously, that right there is something worth celebrating. There is so much power in having a clear vision, girl. But now you feel stumped about what to do next.
First, I want to share 3 mindset shifts to get your wheels turning toward taking action on your dreams.
Mindset Shift 1: Take the pressure off and make a move.
Okay you don’t know what to do so you’re probably just standing still, right? I think there is a time and a place for being still. It’s important. Stillness allows us to process things. It gives us the opportunity to get real with ourselves. I’d even argue that sometimes a certain type of stillness can lead us toward clarity. But you can’t stay still and expect things to happen. Oftentimes, we refuse to take a step if we don’t feel like we have the whole thing figured out. We put an extreme amount of pressure on ourselves to “take the right step.”
What if I told you that the next step you take IS your next right step? There really isn’t a hard starting point and a hard ending point when it comes to a lot of our dreams.
Because once we reach a goal, we will probably set a new one.
Or we might discover a different one on the way to the original one.
Our dreams look more like a maze than a straight path.
Focus on the next step itself instead of being overwhelmed by the whole picture. Because the next step you take will lead you to the one after that which will lead you to the one after that and so on. No matter what, you’re going to end up where you’re supposed to be. Even if that place isn’t where you thought you were going.
Mindset Shift 2: Direction is more important than speed.
I want to tell you a story about something that I struggled with a few months ago. I was doing something that sounds SUPER weird. And you might be doing it too without even recognizing it. I actually shared this on Instagram as I was going through it. I realized that I was accidentally going after the wrong dream.
Like what? How is that even possible right?
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Here’s the thing: I follow a lot of biz-savvy women here on the gram. A lot of the content that I consume is from people who are speaking on stages in front of thousands of people. People who are putting on live events. People whose goal is to be a public figure. AND THESE ARE ALL WONDERFUL THINGS. But without even noticing, I began subconsciously striving for these things. I look up to these women and thought that I had to be mirroring my dreams after theirs if I wanted to be seen as successful. I was comparing what I was doing to what these women were doing and feeling like a total failure.⠀
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WHICH MAKES NO SENSE because my goals have nothing to do with speaking on stages or hosting live conferences. I was striving for these things that make other women successful because I got so caught up in their dreams. I was running in a race that I didn’t want to be in. I was working toward things that aren’t even my actual goals.⠀
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My actions were aligned with doing what someone else is trying to do rather than what I’m trying to do. Be a conscious consumer. Be inspired by other people crushing their goals but don’t let your dreams be influenced by theirs. We spend so much time consuming that sometimes we don’t even realize that we let our guard down and allow what other people are doing to poke holes in our actual dreams. Your dreams are YOURS. They aren’t going to look like anyone else’s! You might have the same dream as someone else but your method of getting there is going to look different. Simply because you’re you and they are them.
I would much rather be heading toward my actual dream slowly than toward a dream that isn’t mine quickly, you know? Slow progress is still progress.
Mindset Shift 3: Be okay with starting small and messy.
Point blank - everyone has to be bad at something before they can be good at it. I mean unless you’re some sort of prodigy you’re most likely going to have to fall down a few times before you feel confident in what you’re doing.
When you’re going after big dreams or trying new things, there is going to be a learning curve. It’s like when we had to take trigonometry in high school - you don’t sit down, hear one lecture, and then take the final exam. You show up all school year and hear lectures. You do classwork and homework to help you practice what you learned. You take quizzes and chapter tests to cement that practice. Then after a whole year or semester or whatever of learning, trying, getting it wrong, trying again, repeat - then you take the final exam.
Going after our dreams is the same in the sense that you don’t envision the dream one day and then the next day take the first step and then the next day you’re living the dream. The small, messy start that you take now is what’s going to lead you to living that dream later. You’ve heard it before I’m sure, but the time is going to pass us by anyway, so you can either spend that time sitting on your couch being sad that you don’t know what to do next to make your dream happen which gets you 0% closer to figuring it out OR you can spend that time trying stuff that pushes you slowly toward the goal. And even if it doesn’t work you’re still closer because now you know what to NOT focus your time on, you know?
Next up, 3 action steps that you can do to help you actually plan out your next step no matter what your dream is:
1. Create a reverse engineer map.
2. Create new habits.
3. Shadow someone or hire a coach/mentor.
And here is a little bonus action step: GOOGLE IT. Seriously. I learned how to do almost everything in my business because I Googled it. We have access to information overload so, girl, use it!
If you enjoyed this post and want to learn how to put those action steps into practice, then GIRL, you need to listen to episode 022 of the podcast:
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