Category Archives: Planning

Not Making Progress on Your Goals? Don’t Worry There is Plenty of Time…..

We are now three weeks into the new year.  How is 2018 going for you?  Making progress on your new year’s resolutions?  Are you making progress towards your 2018 goals?  If not then don’t worry – there is always next week, next month or next year…….

Or so we tend to think!

However out of the blue people get sick.  People get cancer,  people have accidents and get killed, even celebrities get sick and die suddenly.  We have seen many celebrities die over the past few years.  Just recently Irish musician and singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan of the group Cranberries passed away unexpectedly (R.I.P).  She was only 46 years old and in London to record a cover of her hit song ‘Zombie’ with hard rock band Bad Wolves.   She had left a message with one of the band the night before saying how much she was looking forward to seeing them in the studio the next day to record vocals.  Within hours she was dead – we wait for the inquest to know why but foul play is not suspected.  Sadly in an instant all her dreams, goals and plans are gone.  Sadly we will never get to hear that cover version of ‘Zombie’.

But of course death or serious injury or disability always happens to somebody else.  It will never happen to us and in our reasoning it will always happen to somebody else.   In terms of all our goals and our dreams we estimate that we are going to live the average life and therefore we can say well I’ve got another x number of years to live.   Plenty of time to do all the things that I want to do.  Someday I’m going to be rich.  Someday I’m going to buy that house.  Someday I’m going to go on that holiday.  It’s all gonna happen someday.   But the reality is that we don’t know just how long we have got.

Therefore we should never put our goals and dreams off until tomorrow, next week or next year.  We should never postpone our dreams because we may just unexpectedly run out of time.   Make sure you are spending your time on things that really matter to you.  Yes you and I have to pay bills.   But we need to make sure also to spend at least some part of our day working on our dreams and goals because we just never know how long we actually have and that somebody else might just become me.  Life is like a clock and we just never know when those hands will stop and if we are not careful we will die with all our goals and dreams still inside us.

Place no faith in “Tomorrow,”
For the Clock may then be still.”

The Clock of Life

“The clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour………..
…..So live, love, toil with a will,
Place no faith in “Tomorrow,”
For the Clock may then be still.”
― Robert H. Smith

New Year’s Resolutions 2018 & Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap

My New Year’s resolution is to bridge the knowing doing gap in my life. For example I know all about hypnotherapy and I know all about hypnosis and self-hypnosis but I’m not consistently using these powerful tools in my own life. That means that I’m not taking advantage of these brilliant tools and that is a problem because I’m recommending the same powerful tools to everybody but I’m not gaining the benefits myself. I know what needs to be done but am not implementing it!  Another example that struck me recently was that I was advising someone to invest in cryptocurrencies and when that person didn’t respond positively and did not take me seriously. I was a little bit annoyed and in particular because the value of cryptocurrencies went way up and I was thinking that if that person had listened to me he could have made about $14,000! However, did I take my own brilliant advice? No I didn’t invest money that I had sitting in my savings account in cryptocurrencies and I didn’t benefit either.  Sounds stupid – yes it is! The knowing – doing gap strikes again.

Back in 2013 I actually opened an account to buy Bitcoin and had the account verified. However did I actually buy Bitcoin? No! If I had I would be a wealth man today. In 2013 Bitcoin was trading at $100 /Bitcoin. In the past few weeks they hit $20,000 per Bitcoin. An investment of $500 in 2013 would have been worth $100,000 recently. Again the gap between knowing and doing!

So the big question I would like to ask you today is what do you know that you should do in your life? Maybe your New Year’s resolution could be to actually do it and bridge the knowing doing gap.

Best wishes for 2018!

Tom

PS

If you would like some brilliant ideas to make 2018 a fantastic year then please check out my book Experiments in Personal Change. It is packed full of useful actionable ideas on personal development. Also keep in touch with Life is a Laboratory for further updates on the Experiments in Personal Change course (I will give a special deal on the course to newsletter subscribers so please subscribe now to keep informed of the launch date).