How to Change Your Mindset to Take Massive Action for Success

One of the core success factors is taking massive action. And this is where most people fail to follow through. You see, everyone has dreams and goals they want to achieve in life, yet, they fail to take the necessary to achieve the results they want. The reason? They don’t have the right mindset that programs them to take action. And this is exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Here’s a powerful quote I like from Tony Robbins:

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”

Without action, nothing will come true. Especially in today’s world where information is overloaded.

• If you want to lose weight, you can attend a course or register a workshop and learn how to do so.
• If you want to build a successful e-commerce business, there are plenty of tools and information available on the web itself to teach you how to do so.
• If you want to be financially successful, there are plenty of programs out there that can help you to catapult your financial success to the next level.

So you see, we don’t lack the information or the know-how, what we lack is the action.

In fact, we living in a world where information is everywhere. Whatever you want to achieve in your life, you can learn to do so. From books, seminars, courses, or learn directly from someone who has done it.

Therefore, what you need to achieve success is not the lack of information, rather, it’s your determination to take massive action.

• Are you willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals?
• Are you willing to wake up early and to stay later to accomplish your targets?
• Are you willing to sacrifice your leisure for the success you desire?

Whatever you can learn from books or seminars or from the internet are about “the strategy”, not the execution.

What the school teaches you are the strategies, not execution. Even when you get a mentor to show you how to build a successful business, you will still have to take action and work on the plan.

Please understand that everything you have learned is just a form of potential power. It is when you execute on your knowledge, you transform your potential into real power. Knowledge is not power, my friend, execution on knowledge is true power.

Your Mindset Determines Your Action

In order for you to take massive action, you must change your mindset. It all started with your thinking.

You have to understand that everything you do, the actions you take and the decisions you make, are fueled by your thoughts. Hence, when you change your mindset, you change your results.

No matter what you want to achieve in your life, whether it is to lose weight, to start a business, or to make a career change, you have to realize that you can only realize these goals when you change your mindset.

Thus, to adopt the mindset of an achiever, an action taker, you must understand yourself and why you have not taken massive action in the first place.

If you are someone who often procrastinate or someone who set goals but don’t take any action about them, be honest and ask yourself why.

Why are you not taking the necessary action?

• Is it because you’re afraid of failure and rejection?
• Is it because you think they’re too difficult to execute?
• Is it because you believe you don’t have the time or the necessary skills?

Understanding why you’re NOT taking massive action toward your goals is the first step in identifying the mindset that stops you.

And when you understand what is stopping you, you can then make a positive change and adopt the right mindset.

And once you understand what is stopping you from taking massive action, adopt these 5 mindsets below to transform yourself into an action taker:

1. Reframe your thinking about your work

First, if you want to change your mindset in order to take massive action, you must reframe your thinking about your work.

Extraordinary people are willing to spend hours into their work because they don’t look at their work as just work. They look at their work as a calling.

According to Adam Grant, a Wharton management professor and also a best-selling author, people become more productive and are willing to work more when they know their work has a meaningful and positive impact on others.

In his book, Give and Take, Grant conducted several studies on what motivates workers from call centers to swimming pool lifeguards.

Grant and his team conducted research on call center employees in a public university who were asked to call potential donors for scholarship donations. And you can guess, the work is boring, the employees hate the rejections, and the turnover rate is high.

Grant then required a group of the employees to read stories of students how the scholarships have changed their lives before they started to make the calls. Besides, Grant also arranged the employees to interact with the students who managed to get the scholarships so that the employees can ask the students about his or her studies.

After a month, Grant and his team discovered the employees who interacted with the students spent twice as many minutes on the phone and brought in more than double the donations.

You can read about Adam Grant’s study from this article here.

Another study conducted by Grant was the swimming pool lifeguard experiment. Here’s what Grant found: The lifeguards who had been reading about their ability to avert fatalities saw their measure of hours worked shoot up by more than 40%.

In short, when you found that your work is meaningful and creating an impact on other people’s lives, you are willing to work harder.

When you know your work is making a difference in someone else’s life, your mindset will shift and you are more willing to put in more effort.

Here’s a question you need to ask:

What is your purpose and how your work is creating an impact?

So stop looking at your work just plain work. You need to look at your work as a calling that will leave an impact on the world and on other people’s lives.

Like the janitor who worked at NASA. When the then President John F. Kennedy asked the janitor what he did, the janitor answered, “I’m helping to land a man on the moon.”

The janitor looked at his job not just about cleaning the floor, but a bigger mission.

What about you?

If you want to build a successful blog, what are you trying to impact the world? Are you trying to inspire your readers to take action or are you trying to leave a positive impact on the world?

When you know your work is bigger than just “work”, you will become more motivated to take action.

2. Focus on the rewards

The second thing you can do to shift your mindset so that you become an action taker is to focus on the rewards.

Stop thinking about the inconveniences, the difficulties, and the problems, instead, choose to focus on the rewards.

Where you focus on, energy flows.

When you think about the difficulties, the problems, or the rejections you’re going to receive, trust me, you will quickly lose your motivation and choose to procrastinate on your work.

Imagine if you’re in sales and you need to call potential prospects for the business. Before you call, you keep on imagine your prospects reject you and hang up on you, how does that make you feel? Not good, right?

On the other hand, if you focus on thinking about closing the sale, talking with a happy customer on the phone, and becoming the top sales of the month, how does that make you feel?

It all depends on your focus. Wherever you focus on, expands.

Thus, if you choose to focus and think about all the bad things that can happen, your mood will change and highly likely, you’re not going to take the necessary action.

On the contrary, if you focus on the rewards and the positive results you want, you will be motivated by them and there is a high possibility that you will take action.

As simple as that. Focus on the rewards.

Instead of thinking about the failures, think about the success you’re going to get.

Stop thinking about difficulties in writing a blog post, focus on the successful blog you’re going to build.

Stop thinking about feeling exhausted or tired in exercising, focus on having the energy, the health, and the great body shape that you desire.

In short, focus on what you want, not what you don’t want.

“Focus on the possibilities for success, not on the potential for failure.”

3. Clarify your specific actions

If you want to change your mindset so that you will take massive action for success, here’s what you need to do: be specific.

Don’t say that you’re going to exercise, state it specifically:

• “I’m going to work out in the gym this Thursday for an hour from 4PM.”
• “I’m going to write a blog post of at least 2,000 words and publish it before 11AM this Saturday.”
• “I will meditate for 15 minutes at 7AM in my room.”

You have to give specific and clear instructions to your brain if you want to carry out the action.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits and the psychology of habits called this “implementation intention”. Clear explained this technique in a very detailed article here and I suggest you read it.

Too often, people are being vague with their action steps. They say, “I’m going to eat healthily”, or “I’m going to write more”, but they don’t follow through.

This is because it is difficult to focus on actions that are vague. How do you want to write more? When and where?

When it comes to taking action, you have to be extremely specific. Don’t just say that you are going to exercise, be more specific. Tell yourself what are you going to do specifically, by when and at where.

And as suggested by James Clear, you can follow this formula to create specific action steps so that you follow through:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Hence, stop being vague and start to be specific.

4. Create a sense of urgency

Do you have a sense of urgency for your work? If you don’t, that is why you don’t take action or stick to your plan.

You see, successful people have a sense of urgency for what they want to create in their lives. They understand that they can’t leave things open-ended, they need to have a deadline.

If your goals or your action plans don’t come with a deadline, you will take as much time you need to get it done, which is – forever. And it means never get anything done.

And having a sense of urgency works in accordance with the Parkinson’s Law that states, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

When you allocate 6 hours to write an article, guess what, you will use all the 6 hours to complete the article.

And if you allocate 3 hours to write the article, you will get the article written within 3 hours. You will give it the first priority and focus on writing the article. Other tasks have to give way.

This is what Parkinson’s Law is about. And this is the reason why we need to have a sense of urgency to get things done.

This is why we need to have deadlines for our goals. And we need to create a sense of urgency for not just our goals, but also our action strategy.

Nas, the successful YouTuber who created and published a video on YouTube every day, dedicated his success to this: deadline.

Watch this video below of how he explained deadlines have helped him achieved so much more in life.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The sense of urgency doesn’t mean that you’ll have to succumb to low quality work just because you’re running out of time.

I believe that the sense of urgency is a mindset. It is the thinking that gets you to do what you need to do because you want to accomplish the work on time.

Share your deadlines with others

One crucial thing you need to do when it comes to deadlines is that you must share it with someone else.

You see, when you set a deadline for your goal, nobody knows about it except yourself. And what if you don’t hit your goal when it is time? Well, since nobody knows about it, that’s okay for you.

Hence, don’t keep your deadlines to yourself. Share it with others. Create external commitment and get others to hold you accountable.

When others are watching and keeping an eye on your progress, you will more likely to act.

This is how you can make a change in your mindset to take massive action.

5. Change your emotion state

This is a common, yet powerful method to change your thinking in order to take action.

When you’re motivated, you will take massive action, right?

So it’s easy then, all you need to do is to get yourself into the motivational state where you are driven to take action.

Here are some suggestions on what you can do to boost your level of motivation:

• Stretch your body or do some light exercise,
• Read a motivational book,
• Listen to uplifting songs,
• Review your goals,
• Visualize the success you desire, etc.

Read my previous article to learn how you can increase your level of motivation quickly:

10 Quick & Easy Ways How to Increase Your Motivation ASAP

When you are in a motivated state, you seem to have the drive and energy to do even the hardest thing. But when you’re not in the right state, you will never want to do even the easiest task of the day.

I strongly believe that motivation is important. People who tell you motivation isn’t important simply don’t know how it works.

Yes, you need to build good habits. And yes, you need to develop a supportive environment. But that doesn’t mean you should totally ignore motivation.

Remember, motivation is the energy that fuels your action. Without motivation, you will never want to do things.

And this is exactly why most people fail to take massive action in the first place. They lack the motivation to act.

Regardless of whether they lack the commitment, desire, or the right habit, they still need to have the motivation to work things out.

So, work on your motivation each day.

Keep your motivation high and maintain your momentum.

Whenever you lack motivation, do something to boost it up. Change your attire, switch your workplace, drink a cup of coffee, exercise, visualize your dreams, do affirmations, whatever.

Do you whatever you can to maintain your motivation every day.

Remember this quote from Zig Ziglar:

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily!”

Conclusion

Your thoughts determine your potential. And your potential will determine your actions and ultimately, determine your results.

If you want to take massive action to achieve the success you want in life, you must start with changing your mindset – your thinking pattern.

When the way you think changes, so will your action.

Use the 5 techniques mentioned above to change your mindset:

1. Reframe your thinking about your work
2. Focus on the rewards
3. Clarify your specific actions
4. Create a sense of urgency
5. Change your emotion state

So, do you think these 5 methods I shared can help you change your mindset and finally take massive action to achieve your dreams and goals? Let me know in the comment section below.