Yoda Had It Right, and So Much Depends on This…
Aug 12, 2020
Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on June 18, 2020.
I don’t know that I’ve ever watched any one of the Star Wars movies start to finish, but the one line that I’ve resonated with more was where Yoda said “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
Leading up to this point, we’ve looked at the importance of being very intentional about what we allow to shape our beliefs, then we took a hard look at controlling our thoughts, so let’s move on now to the next step in A Cycle for Success: the ACTIONS we take on a day to day basis…
Master Yoda may have been on to something. While we don’t always have complete control of the outcome, one of the few things we can control 100% of the time – IF WE CHOOSE TO – is our actions. And when we’ve been intentional about those first two things we looked at in this cycle, our ability to maintain complete control over the actions we take increases significantly!
I’m sure you can think back to any number of illustrations that prove this point, but the one that pops into my mind is from more than 30 years ago. I remember moving from Fulks Run to Broadway between my 5th and 6th grade years in school. Not a huge deal since all of my friends from elementary school would going to the same middle school… The biggest difference was that we now only lived about a mile from the community swimming pool, and a kid was actually allowed to ride a bike that far alone in those days. For the next two or three summers, I spent nearly every day at that pool. But I also remember my utter fear of diving, even from the lower diving boards, during the first few weeks of going that the pool!
My existing belief was that it would be dangerous in some way. That belief resulted in kinds of thoughts about what could happen to me if I attempted to dive and didn’t do it right, not the least of which being utter humiliation in front of the new friends I was hoping to make… And those thoughts had a direct impact on my actions. Or more specifically, my lack of action in attempting to learn how to dive…
I don’t recall exactly what spurred it, but somewhere along the lines reason began to creep in and take over; or maybe it was a degree of hazing from the other kids who could dive…? Regardless, I began to notice far younger kids who could dive without suffering the life threatening injuries I had dreamed up. As I look back at just that one part of the process now, I think of how often I’ve heard John Maxwell say “You’re NEVER good the first time” over the last several years, but I don’t think I would have been ready for that statement then!
Over the course of several weeks, I started taking incremental steps toward actually being able to dive from a diving board. I’ll spare you details of the process, the ACTIONS I specifically took in learning to do it. I did, however, eventually learn how! I have no doubt that I was picked as I learned, but none of that stuck with me. What did stick with me was that taking action, albeit slow and sometimes painful, yielded something I was after – and we’ll look at that part of creating A Cycle for Success in the next message!
