TEM Coaching Tip: The best advice I've ever received

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received came from a mentor who was the tough love sort. He always did it with compassion and kindness but he never, ever shied away from telling you what he thought you needed to hear, even if it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

He told me that if I wanted to evaluate my belief systems, ignore my thoughts and ignore my feelings and only look at my actions.

This piece of advice has had a profound impact on me since the moment I first heard it.

If I tell myself that writing this book is important to me and yet only manage to sit down and actually write a few times a month then it is not nearly as important to me as I’ve been telling myself.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes from my perceived priorities and actions not lining up. That’s when there is a conflict within myself and frequently with others. This can lead to a constant feeling of not doing enough or of being inadequate. When these two things are severely misaligned I can feel like an impostor.

I once heard author Ramit Sethi say that if you want to reveal your true priorities, document every single thing that you do in a calendar for two weeks. Write down everything you do, from time on Twitter to composing music.

At the end of those two weeks take a look at two things: your calendar and your bank statement. Sethi argues that a person’s true priorities are revealed through how they allocate their time and their money.

The clarity that comes from this process frequently has two profound effects.

The first is it can make you more honest with yourself about your true priorities. It can actually free you from goals you feel that you “should” have when in reality they either aren’t for you or aren’t for you right now.

The other is it can make you get honest with yourself about your pursuit of some goals. If after undergoing this process you still feel strongly that something your actions have been neglecting is still a priority, it tends to make you change those actions in a hurry to better align with your thinking.

The bottom line is our actions tell us far more about ourselves and our current trajectory than our thoughts and feelings ever will and should always be front and center when evaluating ourselves.