Is Info-Addiction Keeping You from Your Dream? 10 Steps to Break Free
Its an easy trap. You get an inspiration about something you would like to do and start exploring how to do it. Before you know it, months have passed and all you have to show for it is a massive collection of downloads and an inbox full of email telling you the latest must-have piece that will guarantee your success. Meanwhile, your dream drifts deeper into tomorrow land. What should you do?
Beginning a new venture is always a little scary because youre stepping into unfamiliar territory. Before you set out, its natural and wise to arm yourself with information. But if you truly want to live your dream, you need take the risk of beginning before you know all there is to know. The ocean of information is deep and ever-changing and youll drown in it before you get to its far shore.
No amount of information will make it easy to take your first step into the unknown. In fact, gathering more and more information will tend to overwhelm you and make your venture seem intimidating and complex. Instead of achieving your aim of removing the uncertainty, you actually increase it.
If you find yourself collecting more and more information on a topic with the not-quite-conscious hope that youll reach some kind of magical tipping point where everything will suddenly make sense, fall into a neatly ordered arrangement, and that youll wake up knowing exactly what to do, chances are you have developed an information addiction.
If you suspect you have fallen into the info-collecting trap, you may want to try this strategy to get your original dream on track again:
1. Impose an information blackout on yourself for the next 30 days. Go cold turkey. Delete all email from your favorite information providers without even opening it. Use the time youll save to reorient yourself toward your dream.
2. Figure out why you got interested in the subject in the first place. What were you hoping to achieve? What did you dream about doing with the information? How were you planning to use it?
3. Now that you have invested time gathering information, ask yourself how your dream has changed? Do you seem more of its details? Spend some time clarifying what you want to do as specifically as you can.
4. Evaluate how important your dream is to you. Think about how it would feel to actually accomplish it, to have it be a real part of your experience.
5. Organize the information you have already collected. Take your collection of ebooks and articles on dream-related topics and organize them by category. Create a database, or even a hand-written list. That way, youll know what you already have on hand and when the need for it arises, youll remember it and be able to find it more readily.
6. Imagine that you had to develop a plan for making your dream happen with just the information you already have at your disposal. Where would you begin? Pretend that somebody was going to pay you a big wad of cash to give them a written plan for doing whatever it is you want to do and that you had no access to more info than you already have on hand. Outline what you would advise them to do.
7. Take the first item of your plan and develop some goals for taking action on it. Identify five or six small steps you can accomplish in the next week and determine to do them. Do five or six more steps the following week and keep going.
8. Accept that youll make plenty of mistakes. Remind yourself that they are a natural and valuable part of the learning process and that its okay. Then just begin, right where you are and let the process unfold.
9. Instead of collecting more information to give you support, find a couple other people who share your interest and form a master mind group. Not only will they provide you with living insights, but in helping the others grow, youll recognize more about what you already know.
10. To keep yourself from falling back into the info-collecting habit, when you begin to seek out more information, adopt the powerful rule never to go longer than a week without applying each piece of information that you learn.
Time is fleeting. Make the most of it by putting information to use and gain the satisfaction of seeing your dreams come true.
Want to learn more about achieving your goals and dreams? Get a subscription to The Magical Mirror newsletter with enrollment in my free e-course, How to Change Your Life and Live Your Dreams. Click here:
Live Your Dreams
Susan K. Minarik is the author of Winning the Tomorrow Game
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