Keep Moving Forward

4 Tips to keep moving forward

Keep Moving Forward

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney

Are there times when you just feel overwhelmed? How about those days when nothing seems to be going right, have any of those? Have you or someone you known faced a significant heath or financial crisis? Most of us have at one point or another and we are likely to face more in the future. Sometimes life throws some big challenges our way. What can we do?

We will all most likely face stressful times and hard decisions in our lifetime. These events will happen, usually not by our own making, and most often without warning. As these things occur we have two choices. We can either face the challenge and find ways to keep moving forward or we can surrender. We can either assess the situation and find a way to get to the next day, or not. Clearly the or not option is not a viable solution, so it really leaves us with the move forward option.

People who have faced difficult challenges tell us that the only really solution is to find the strength to move forward. Today may appear bleak and perhaps even hopeless, but if we can find the will to make it to tomorrow we will find that we are one day closer to our solution. When we are able to focus on getting to tomorrow we are in the process of moving forward.

There are many people facing difficult circumstances everyday and if we are one of them then we know the challenge of moving forward. Fortunately, for most of us we are not facing dire circumstances and we should be grateful for that blessing. Nonetheless, most of us feel the stress of things not going our way and have the same feelings as those in dire circumstances though perhaps to a lesser extent.

When we face difficult circumstances either personally or professionally, the best thing we can do is “put one foot in front of the other” and keep moving forward. There is no future in looking back, after all the future is in front of us. Looking back allows our emotions to relive the event and does nothing to help us get to the next opportunity.

Most of the things we fear never happen to us, they are just projections of our imagination. Sometimes we tend to view our current circumstances through a negative lens and only see more negativity in front of us. The reality is that most of the things we fear will not actually happen to us. Our fear is mostly driven by projecting ourselves into other people’s difficult situations. Our empathy for them can make us feel as though we are there and allow us to relive an event that we have never truly experienced.

Our worry is just wasted energy. Worrying about things that most likely will never happen engages us to focus on things that fortunately we will never experience. When bad things do happen, they usually happen in unexpected ways. And here is the thing, we are so resilient that when something bad happens, we almost always find a way to rise above the issue. We would not have gotten this far if our first action was to surrender.

When things are not going our way, the best thing we can do is to keep moving forward. Find a way to get to the next day and things will be better. Hang in there and give ourselves a chance to find a solution. Tomorrow will open a new door and we need to see where it leads.

Here are 4 tips for helping us continue to keep us moving forward:

Let Go to Move Forward

Let Go to Move Forward

“Oh, yesterdays are over my shoulder, So I can’t look back for too long. There’s just too much to see waiting in front of me, and I know that I just can’t go wrong”Jimmy Buffett

Recently, one of my readers posed an interesting question, ” …you have to let go of now before you can pickup something new, how do you free yourself to take the leap?” How many times have we hesitated on moving forward because we were afraid to take the next step? How often have we complained about our current situation and even had an idea for the solution or wanted to make a significant change, but sat on the sidelines because it was seemed more secure? I know I certainly have.

As I reflect on my personal hesitations, I often find that I was living with the false belief that my present situation was secure and that it was a risk to move forward. Over the years I have come to discover that security is really an illusion. There is no more certainty that tomorrow will be the same as today as there is likelihood that it will be different. We could be so fortunate as to win the lottery or inherit a great wealth or so unfortunate as to lose our health or employment.

To quote Helen Keller, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

So what do we do? How do we live with that reality and how do we let go of today to get to a better tomorrow? There are a couple of previous Blog posts we can take a look at that may offer us some guidance and structure.

In the Change Formula blog we discussed that our motivation for moving forward (change) was a product of our level of dissatisfaction with the current situation, a strong vision of the future, and practical next steps. The formula theorized that if all of these things were strong we would be motivated to move forward (change).

In the Be Bold blog we discussed that being bold to move forward was not an act of taking a foolish risk, but about putting together a well thought out plan, being confident in our abilities, gaining the knowledge needed and then taking action. In other words moving from careless risk to prudent risk with a high likelihood of success.

So what can we do? Let’s take a look at the issue we are hesitating about and figure out how to move forward.

Here are some practical steps: