Today I ask you to reflect on something: What was your emotional and psychological state when you last took action?

I really want us all to reflect on this now, because we are all experiencing a similar stressful event. We are all experiencing this pandemic where we’ve been called on to make a lot of decisions lately, and we’ve had to take a lot of actions. Even though we could talk about this at any time because we all share the fact that we have stress in our lives, talking about this now gives us a stressful event that we have in common. If we look at this situation specifically, it gives us the opportunity to learn something.

What I ask you to think about is this: What was your psychological and emotional state as you took actions in the face of what we have going on today? Maybe it was making that decision to telework, or going shopping, or checking on relatives – think back to how you felt emotionally and what led you to that point of taking action. This can be a discriminator between those who make progress toward their goals and those who don’t – the difference is now centered you are when you are going through those actions.

Many of us react to a situation emotionally as our motivation to get going. Instead, we can get better results if we address things instead from a place of clarity about our vision, from a centeredness and a groundedness within ourselves. For me, by the second or third article about the pandemic I realized that something I could do would have an impact on how this situation we find ourselves in would continue. I could see clearly in the data that if I made a decision to stay at home, to get prepared, to prepare my family, I am helping the future – I am going to help hospitals be able to keep up; I am going to avoid spreading things. I made that decision from a place of clarity that I want to be someone who helps in the world, who thinks about the globe in addition to myself.

As our family was preparing to stay at home, to work from home, to keep our son at home, I was feeling very grounded and calm during that. There were others who took those same actions, but from a place of fear. Maybe their actions were motivated by seeing people freaking out, empty grocery shelves, emotional video pleas from other countries, or pictures of overcrowded hospitals. Think back to where you fell on that spectrum. Were you in a calm state of being clear on who you wanted to be in the world, or were you eventually forced to take action through emotions of fear and anxiety? Or perhaps you were choosing to live with blinders until there were mandates and government decisions.

This particular situation we are all experiencing gives us a common perspective from which to look at this question. However, this was just as true two months ago, and this will be just as true a year from now as it is today. How you take action – whether it is emotionally driven or vision driven makes a difference.

How you are approaching this situation is highly likely how you are addressing other situations too, including the day to day things that might typically go under the radar. So, take this as an opportunity to reflect and to think about how changing how you take action might impact the other goals you have in life. Think about who you want to be in the world, and act from a place of confidence in that clarity. You’re strong when you’re clear, you’re weak when you’re fearful. Your ability to string together those decisions of confidence and clarity will lead you toward your goals much more efficiently, effectively, and with more success.

Today that is what I ask of you. Take time to think about this and let me know if there’s anything you want to share with me about it. We’re all trying to stay as virtually connected as we can right now so I welcome more than ever your thoughts, your emails, and your comments! Please share this with others you think might benefit from it.