A prelude to action ...

What stops people from taking action – in anything – a technique in the heat of the struggle – buying that first property – clearing e-mail from inbox – distributing that new pamphlet for a budding business?
This is a very interesting topic – to myself at least. The difference between pulling the trigger and taking action and endless weighing and pondering is more often than not, the difference between living an extraordinary and successful life and one of mundane sameness.
There are usually a number of factors that inhibit people from taking action – but among the most powerful of them is that of ‘lack of ownership’.
I have talked about this recently in some of my seminars. One of the things I insist upon is that participants remember the techniques that I teach one week after I have finished teaching them. This seems like an obvious and easy request but in my experience, the majority of people cannot remember or replicate what was taught to them in a seminar, after even s single nights sleep has come and gone. When I teach, I try to do so in such a way that maximizes the possibility of everyone remembering what we have covered; I do so because I understand that REMEMBERING is the first step toward taking full OWNERSHIP of any form of knowledge. WE need to bring new knowledge into our minds in the kind of way that allows us to DO SOMETHING WITH IT at a later date. One of the first things we need to do is to make a clear distinction between ACCESS TO INFORMATION and the OWNING of it.
We live in a world where oral traditions are rapidly becoming a relic of the past. Many would argue that we needed hold information in our headspace, when we can easily access it on the internet, in books or on DVD’s. In my opinion however, these things are just tools that should be not be overly depended upon.
I feel that the reason people often fail to take decisive action is because they do not properly OWN the knowledge they have momentarily borrowed from outside sources. Once we take knowledge of a subject into our mind and have truly digested and taken ownership of it, some sort of ‘critical tipping point’ is reached and we allow ourselves to ACT.
Make a clear distinction between the state of having been exposed to knowledge and the state of having taken ownership of it.
JBW