How to create a Personal Breakthrough?
Fulfilling our dreams and our ability to thrive in the areas of our lives that matter most can be simplified by breakthroughs, those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible. If you want to thrive in any area of your life, you’ve to reach a point of breakthrough where you will not settle for anything less than extraordinary in that area.
Whether you want a breakthrough in your business, career, personal life, emotional well-being, health or finances, there are areas to break through to feel lasting success. Here are 5 steps to a breakthrough to transform your working life. Maybe you should try them.
1. Slow Down
Let’s not always stop sitting on the edge of the seat. Never be in more of a hurry than you have to be. Let’s allow time for thinking, musing, just noodling around in your head with no apparent purpose. Give space in thinking for ideas we haven’t had yet; allow openings for sniffing out the ideas of others. As the Portugese proverb says: “Haste is the enemy of creativity”.
Being busy all the time is a great way to stop any possibility of breakthroughs. We won’t break out of our old habits by rushing. When people are under pressure, they don’t have energy to try any newer things. They reach for whatever they’ve done before, or for some supposedly “tried and tasted” answers. They don’t believe they have time to take risks with change. As a result, they rush headlong down the same old paths into the same old messes. Refuse to be hurried and surprising ideas and opportunities may present themselves.
2. Just Listen
No one has ever learnt anything just by talking about him/herself and through his/her own experiences alone. We learn by listening to the ideas and experiences of others. By listening to the ideas of those around us, we can pick up whatever’s useful. Even the things we reject earlier may teach us something new.
Everyone we talk with can bring us learning opportunities we might otherwise have missed. Never be snobbish either. The best lessons come in unexpected packages. One of the hallmarks of the fool is that he or she thinks learning is restricted to the “right” situations and people. Like birds of a feather, fools flock together, reinforcing their foolishness by deciding they’ll only listen to one another. Wise people know they can’t predict who or what will provide the best lessons in life. Sometimes it will be the voices all the “right” people have rejected.
3. Leave Your Comfort Zone
Deliberately step outside your comfort zone. See what you can find. You may come back as a different or a changed person. Conservatism is the philosophy of always sticking with what you have and trying to defend it against change. It’s a hopeless attempt.
The best, long-lasting and most valuable ideas remain because they continually adapt to the times. The world is bigger, stranger, wonderful, and less predictable than most of us imagine. We won’t find it limited to programs on our TV or what we can find on the Internet. Let’s go out there for an inner journey and look for ourselves.
4. Leave the Past Behind
We’ll see so much better and farther by not imitating the past. Let’s use it to understand better and provoke questions in our minds. History is too often neglected as a source of breakthroughs. By learning from what has already been done, one can make faster steps towards what hasn’t. Innovation is mostly sticking things together in unexpected ways.
To create unique ideas and stimulate breakthrough thinking, hybridize from what we have already. Fresh combinations of old ideas can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. It’s simply not true that creative people come up with ideas from nowhere. Even the most startlingly innovative people need material to work with.
5. Begin anywhere
There’s no right place, nor any better place to start from that where we are right now. Waiting to find the right time and place to begin on our quest for breakthrough is a sure way to induce paralysis. New ideas arrive unexpectedly. Whenever they do, allow them to be heard.
Learn to be alert always for good ideas and opportunities for breakthrough. Be flexible. Grab opportunities when they come. Don’t sit back and expect another one to be along in a moment. The universe isn’t like that. The idea or opportunity we just chose to ignore may have been the best one we’ll ever have. Begin anywhere. Begin now. Just do it.
Call To Action
To sum it up, a breakthrough is something that changes the course of our life going forward and ensures that things will never be the same for us again. Most of what a breakthrough requires is for us to have the courage and the bravery to stops settling for second best. Everything we need in our life already exists. The problem is often that our mind is blocking us from seeing the success tools we need to catapult our life into the right direction.
Always remember these lines:
- Change your Strategy, Change your result.
- Change your story, change your life.
- Change your state — you change it all!
About the Author
Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan, Evolve HR thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.
