The Only 4 Reasons You Don’t Act
We all know that in order to achieve anything we need to act. Still, most of us don’t act when we need to. Why is that? There are only 4 reasons for our inaction. Learn more about them and the ways to start acting.
1. We don’t know what to do
The most common and the first reason is all about clarity.
A) We have no clear vision, purpose, and goal. Until we are able to establish those, we won’t be able to move and will only do what we are doing habitually. If you want to move from this point — make sure to define them very clearly.
B) We have no understanding of the way we need to take to get there. This is where having access to Internet often hurts — having to choose from a huge number of options is not a skill we are good at. There are two easy countermeasures you can take: 1. Think of it in terms of just one next step. 2. Pick the one way you want to try and make this first step.
2. We don’t know how to do it
When we have no skills or previous experience with the task at hand, we will struggle and avoid doing it. There are few simple solutions to this problem:
A) Delegate it. Find a person who has a know-how/skill and ask them to do it.
B) Learn how to do it. This might take a lot of time and should only be used if you plan to use your skill later.
C) Do it anyway. Just do it with your current level of skill and knowledge. You will get better results than just doing nothing.
3. We can’t do it
This is all about the lack of resources. Money, people, power, time, energy, tools, etc. This one is a most difficult part to overcome, but before we give up on acting we should evaluate a few things:
A) Do we really need that much resources? Often many things can be done with significantly less resources than we believe.
B) Can we change the way of achieving our goal (2) so we won’t need as many resources?
C) Can we trade one resource for another? For example —spend more time and energy to compensate for lack of money or tools…
D) Can we invite, acquire or borrow necessary resources? This is especially important when you need tools, influence or money.
4. We don’t want to
This is the last reason for our inaction and the one that causes most controversy. Usually, when we think about why someone haven’t done what they promised us, we quickly jump to a conclusion that they don’t want to. But this thought only should occur to us when we have exhausted previous 3 reasons.
A small note about time here. Normally, we have way much more things we want to do than we can do in a given period of time. If we are not able to clearly set our priorities — we won’t make any significant progress on any of the items. So if you really want to achieve something— make sure that you focus only on this thing.
We might not want to do something for 3 main reasons:
- This is not high enough on our list of priorities. The easiest solution for this kind of problem — say “No” to this kind of tasks. And forget about them.
- We feel bad about the task. Maybe it is boring, annoying or otherwise unpleasant. If this is the case, you can “force yourself” to do it anyway (“Eat the frog”) or change the way you see it.
- We feel insecure about ourselves: our skills, our ability to succeed, our ability to handle either success or failure, the feedback we will get from others… This is all about our confidence, and it is too long to explain here.
Instead of conclusion
Those four reasons above cover ALL the possible reasons for inaction. Note, that I never mentioned things as willpower, procrastination, motivation, etc. We often blame our lack of action on them, while in fact they are often not involved at all. So, next time you start blaming yourself for inaction — take a close look at the reasons for it and you will sure find a real reason behind it.
If this article was helpful to you and you liked it, click the green heart below. This will help to spread the word and might help someone else.
