I’ve been talking about rebooting your life for a while now.  I started out with some priority setting, moved on to making a plan and then talked about being honest with yourself and with others.  I’ve been doing this because I want you to succeed.  I want you to feel the same intense feeling of joy that I feel, a feeling like my life is moving in the right direction.  Well, if up until now we’ve talked about planning, now it’s time to actually start moving; it’s time to take that first step.

Yes, I know, it’s scary.  You’re about to embark on a quest that might change your entire life.  What if you fail?  What if people see you fail?  Will they make fun of you?  Are you being a fool to risk your whole life like this?  Are you making a bad decision?  What are going to be the consequences?  Oh no!  What if you lose your job?  Your house?  Your life savings?

Sound familiar?

We all have these inner monologues that keep us from actually taking a first step.  As much as we dream about the best case scenario, when it comes time to actually doing, we stop ourselves with constant nightmares about the worst case.  I used to be this way.  I would prefer to day dream about my immense success than to actually take the first step and do something to improve my life.  After all, life was perfect in the day dreams.  Everything went well and I needed to do no work.  Well, life isn’t that easy, but on the bright side, it’s also not as bad as you imagine.  Let’s take an example.

My biggest goals right now are to start a family and retire young.  In order to do that, I came up with some to do items as you can see in this post right here.

Some of the items on my list for starting a family:

• Get to know people through various online services
• Sign up for meetup.com

Both of these essentially had to do with meeting people, something I was having difficulty with considering my busy scheduling.  Some of the items on my list for retiring:

• Refinance mortgage
• Refinance school loans

As you can see, both of these had to do with reducing expenses.

First things first, break it down!

In order to make that first step a bit less scary, break down your task into smaller items.  I already started doing this by breaking down “retire young” into “Increase income” and “reduce expenses”.  I then broke it down into even smaller items such as “start a personal finance blog” and “refinance school loans”.  Now we’re going to break it down even further.  The goal here is to come up with actions that are small, manageable and obvious.  For example, in order to refinance my mortgage I had items like “get in touch with bank”, “shop around for loans” and “get paperwork in order”.  These smaller tasks allow you to tackle a big project in bite size chunks.  That way you don’t feel overwhelmed by some huge projects that you have no idea on how to start.

Now, take that first action.  For refinancing a mortgage it was “call my bank and see what they offer”.  That’s pretty simple, right?  It’s not scary, it’s not risky, I’m just going to call up my bank and see what they have to tell me.  For “meet people through online services”, my first action was “sign up for plenty of fish“.  This is a free dating site that allows people to meet and chat.  Sort of like a match.com without the monthly fees.  I felt like this was an easy way to try online dating without any risk.  I also had similar plans for refinancing school loans and signing up for meetup.com.

I went ahead and did all of these things.  Two of them I failed on, meetup.com turned out to be a dud and I didn’t enjoy my outings through that service while refinancing school loans proved impossible due to some government legislation.  So, what bad things happened?  The answer is, absolutely nothing.  I learned a few things about myself and about government legislation.  No one made fun of me, no one called me a failure, I didn’t lose any life savings nor did I destroy my life.  On the other hand, I did meet a wonderful woman and we’re currently in a relationship that makes me extremely happy.  I also managed to refinance my mortgage, thanks to some advice from friends, and save a few hundred dollars a month without any expenses on my end.

Now it’s your turn?  What have you been putting off?  What do you want to do but haven’t dared yet?  Remember these simple steps:

1. Prioritize – What’s important to you?  Why are you focusing your time and effort on this thing you want to do?
2. Plan – Break down big goals into smaller goals and then set some dates.
3. Communicate – Be honest with yourself and others about your goals.  If they cannot accept them you either have the wrong friends or the wrong goals.  Either way, probably something you should pay attention to.
4. Start!  If you’ve broken down your goals into small enough chunks then that first step should be easy, doable and not so scary.  Take that step today, not tomorrow.

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For those of you who are curious about my experiment with radical honesty, I have to say that it’s been amazing!  I can feel the need to make that occasional white lie that we all make but that’s going away rather quickly.  On the other hand, I feel like every aspect of my life, from my relationship to my job, has improved in quality.  I’ll talk more about this in future updates but needless to say, I’m becoming a convert!