7 Reasons You Should Get Into The Game - Brian Cormack Carr

Since launching my coaching business, I’ve been asked several times if I believe whether we shape our own destiny. My response is for people to get into the game and find out! 

Getting into the game means taking action! Not just the grand, dramatic, self-assured actions of a high achiever assured of success; but also the tentative steps of someone who feels a bit wobbly and doubtful. Just getting yourself in motion – up from your seat, through that front door, down the road – takes you out into the world, where all possibilities await.

Action, in any direction (even when you’re not entirely sure of where you’re headed) can pay enormous dividends.

Here’s why:

1. It can lead you into happy accidents - Plans are wonderful, but they’re not real life. Sometimes our plans come off, and sometimes they don’t. We certainly increase our chances of getting to our destination if we take the time to plot our journey first; but even more importantly, creating and executing a plan gets us moving, and once we’re moving, we soon find ourselves in all manner of unforeseen situations. This is the territory where, very often, your next big step will become apparent to you. It’s not always something you’ve planned for, because you can’t plan to find your way into serendipitous meetings and meaningful coincidences; but once you’re out there moving and shaking, they will find their way to you.

2. It’ll build your self esteem, even if you make mistakes- In my experience – and based upon what I’ve learned from the majority of my clients – the keenest form of regret is the regret felt over paths not taken. It seems that often when we do something that we later judge to be a “mistake”, we are at least comforted by the thought, “well, at least I tried”. Later, if we contemplate why we made a particular choice, we might come to understand that we made the best possible decision with the information, experience, and skills we had available to us at the time. But not trying in the first place, and later wishing we had, is a harder burden to bear, because it leaves us wondering “what if?”, with no way of finding out. Taking action sometimes gets us what we want, and it sometimes gets us something else entirely. But if we’ve at least done something, our self-esteem remains intact even when our dreams don’t – and that makes it all the easier to pick ourselves up and move forward.

3. It’ll find you contacts & connections- Unless you leave your front door ajar with a sign on it saying “Everyone welcome, come on in!”, then chances are that you won’t meet very many new people sitting at home. In order to meet the people who can help you move forward towards your goals, you have to put yourself about a bit. That way you can be introduced to the kind of company you want to keep, and you’ll also find yourself bumping into people you didn’t even know you’d enjoy meeting (see “Happy Accidents”, above) but who will be significant players in your life nonetheless. There are few interests in the 21st Century that don’t have a group, forum, trade show, conference, bulletin board, meetup or some other form of gathering associated with them. Once you’ve discovered what you love, start mixing with other people who share your delights. You’ll find camaraderie, support, and a rich source of ideas and encouragement for your dreams.

4. It’ll give you a new perspective- Doing something – anything – in the direction of your goals, will result in results. In other words, your efforts will start to bear fruit. Or not. Either way, you’ll learn some valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t, who to speak to and who to avoid, what your own preferred ways of working are, and all manner of other useful things. You can use the feedback you receive (this could be in the form of actual events, or comments from others, or your own feelings and observations) to adjust your course, reassess your goals and milestones, and build a useful database of information as you forge ahead.

5. It’ll Increase Your Energy- Anyone who has ever slept in too long and spent the rest of the day feeling like a zombie wading through treacle, will understand that only energy begets energy. Sitting around waiting (for longer than you reasonably need to in order to rest) will begin to deplete your batteries. Your energy levels will dwindle, and you’ll find it harder and harder to get moving. It’s a principle of the physical world that it takes a greater force to start a stationary object moving than it takes to keep it in motion, and it’s a principle that holds true for human beings, too. That’s why it can often be very hard to start something new; but once you have started, you’ll find it takes much less effort to keep going than you perhaps imagined.

6. It’ll help you recover from setbacks- It would be highly unusual if there weren’t any setbacks or obstacles on the path to your dreams. These will happen – count on it – and one of the very best ways to cope with them is to keep busy. By all means take time to recover and lick your wounds, if you need to, but once you’ve done the necessary analysis of what went wrong, what you learned from it, and what to do next, get moving again. That way you don’t have to spend time dwelling on what’s not working, and can devote more of yourself to what does – action. Also, the more you do, the more you increase your chances of things going right, and of receiving encouraging feedback about your remarkable capabilities.

7. It’ll motivate you- motivation isn’t something you find “out there”; it’s something you generate from within, by getting in touch with what you love about what you’re doing. The only way to do that is to be doing it! All the motivation you’ll ever need comes from getting – and staying – in the game. As the American poet Maya Angelou says: “Life loves the liver of it”. by Brian Cormack Carr