Stop Start Continue
Life Choices – All who wander are not lost….
Of course there is always the options to just enjoy what comes our way, to accept life and what it brings and run with it.
Having said that, if you do want to actively make some changes then Stop Start Continue is a fantastic tool to incorporate in your tool box.
Most people seem to want to change somethings about their lives and most off these people seem to be stuck in a loop or rut.
Most of us are busy. When questioned, most of us say we have too much going on or we struggle to find time for the things we say are important. And yet most of us spend time doing things that will never take us where we say we want to go.
We use stop, start and continue to evaluate how we are spending our time and effort and to break free and escape the ruts.
This is a simple tool that helps us evaluate what we are doing now and what we could do instead.It provides simple effective options for immediate change and helps us test if we really want what we say we do.
It’s reasonably clear that once we understand where we are going we can make some choices about changing or nudging our world in the direction we want to go.
It helps us if we have some ideas about what is really going on and how things work but even if this is missing most of us are just too busy to change anything.
Success can be yours if you decide what you want and work on the right things to get it. It does not matter what you actually want, whether its a better relationship with your Monkey, to make a million dollars or lose 10 kilos.
This Stop Start Continue practice works to improve your chances of success and it works overnight. Many of our courses were constructed on a platform of success principles and often delegates left our courses with a valuable list of things they would simply not do any more.
If you want to change some things in your life, consciously doing more of what gives you what you want and less of what gives you what you don’t want, is a great place to start. Whilst the fine points of determining what to do or not do, may be tricky, this simple exercise helps you hit some of the key areas quickly and easily.
The Pareto ratio seems to apply everywhere
20% of the advertising gives us 80% of the results
20% of the effort we put in to changing or developing ourselves gives us 80% of the results
Knocking out as much of the 80% activity that only gives us 20% of the results helps us tune our endeavours.
For busy people, getting rid of stuff on their to-do lists to make time for things that matter is a liberating experience and for any of us giving ourselves permission to not …… (fill in yours here) feels fantastic.
Stop start continue gives you a simple framework that will help you and your Monkey target your efforts more effectively on what matters to you. Thousands of people used this simple framework to generate great results quickly and easily.
As you can tell we are fans!!
Stop
We stop doing things that won’t take us where we want to go. The wisdom of this is simple. Most of us are busy and all of us use all the time we have. We may spend hours sleeping or watching TV or exercising but we rarely have time left over.
If we want a change for the better, we must spend our time doing different things. To do this, we must first stop doing some things we do now. We must create the space to do some new things that are more likely to give us what we want.
If your time is already used up, adding more stuff for you to do will never work.
This is the road to stress and burn out and failure.
This is one reason one of the early exercises in both the book and the challenge test our Monkeys desire and ability to help by asking them what we could stop doing.
If you haven’t done it since reading the book, or if you are still too busy, then you might want to redo that exercise now.
Making conscious decisions and giving yourself permission not to do ………… (fill in yours here) , has had one of the biggest positive differences for all our delegates.
For some people giving themselves permission to just stop doing something that they had felt obliged to do
or they habitually done was the greatest gift they could ever have given themselves.
Start
Once we have some space, we can start a few new things that we think improve our chance of reaching our desired destination, the life you want.
Only start things that you know will give you more of what you want or less of what you don’t want or that you will love.
Continue
Finally, we take time to celebrate all the good things we already do. These can be simple things, like getting to work on time, taking part in a challenge or some personal improvement programme, paying the bills or keeping commitments, but it’s good to remember you are already doing plenty of things that work and contribute towards you having the life you really want.
Using Stop Start Continue makes us look carefully at how we do things now and this makes labelling and subsequently discarding problem patterns (part of Stop) much easier.
It’s a great exercise to audit how you spend your energy resources and time.