The Next Aligned Action

Do you find yourself with lots of different ideas at once – concepts, ideas, epiphanies, insights?

This combination is often experienced by people who are thinkers, people who are dreamers, people who love to implement change in their own business and in their own life *raises hand*.

When this is your experience, you need a really practical way of managing your mind.

I have a number of different tricks that I use to break things down into bite sized steps and manageable actions. The big picture vision that drives me on a day to day basis is massive social impact. This is what sits behind the Being More Human brand, the movement that sits behind the book and all of our different initiatives. It’s all about having massive social impact.

Over the years I’ve had to work out ways to ensure that I don’t feel overwhelmed in my business and life. The best way that I’ve found to do this is to be really clear with myself that the only thing that I’m concentrating on at any point is my next step.

I call it the next aligned action.

I coach a lot of people who are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of tasks that they have to do in their workplace. Their manager is expecting this from them. Their upline manager from the middle of Europe is expecting something different from them. Their co workers are expecting something different from them. This person sitting in the middle has this feeling of being overwhelmed by all of the different tasks and requirements that are around them.

There are a range of different ways you could tackle that.  You could write down all your tasks, you could prioritise them. That’s personally not how I choose to do it. 

The way the way that I choose to function is to literally ask myself, “What is the next aligned action? What’s the next right step for me to take?” and then I take that step then and there.

This immediately gives me perspective about what I’m demanding of myself. 

I used to be a list writer. I used to write list after list, after list, after list. Inevitably, I would get to the end of the day, I’d look at my list and I had not achieved anything on it. Or sometimes I would have achieved just one or two of the things that were on my list.

I didn’t like how it made me feel, so I decided to do something different.

I asked myself, “What is a method that I could come up with that would reliably take me in the right direction, that I could implement easily, from anywhere, that was free, that I could put into my own life and into my own world?” That’s when I came up with the next aligned step (or the next right step).

Maybe you want to create a massive social impact, or whatever your big vision might be for you and your business, or the organisation that you work within. Maybe you’re in the middle of writing up that complicated PhD thesis, or in the middle of writing that book, or in the middle of writing a blog or in the middle of coming up with a concept for a new program. Maybe you’re in the middle of delivering something internally in your organisation.

When you have the capability and discipline to quite literally just focus on your next right step, everything else fades into the background. Everything else becomes less significant, because you’ve chosen to put your focus where it needs to be.

It’s also a fantastic way to prioritise, because if you’re saying to yourself during the day, “I just need to know what my next right step is, if there was only one thing I could achieve today, what would that one thing be?” then very quickly, you get good at picking the one thing that is actually more important than all of the other things.

What’s fascinating about this is the sum total of our individual actions add up to our organisational culture. Organisational culture is simply, “The way that we do things around here.” Individual human behaviour creates and shapes organisational behaviour and organisational culture.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I’d like to invite you to our free upcoming webinar in partnership with BRAVE Wellbeing for Business. We’ll be talking about organisational culture and sharing how holistic wellness can create a thriving culture in your organisation.
You’ll learn how to shift your workplace culture globally, reach high levels of productivity and tune in to a true and deep lasting way to support human change.

Save your seat for the webinar here >>

If you have any questions at all, hit reply and let me know!  And in the meantime, on a daily basis, simply remember to do the next align action.