Clarity, Confidence, and Courageous Action

There is a progression that leads to progress.

If you’re anything like me (and Elvis Presley) you want, “a little less conversation and a little more action please.” We want to make progress, to move towards our goals, to check things off our list. Yet many of us find ourselves stuck in a loop of inactivity. Why can’t we seem to do the things we want to do?

I think we struggle to take action because we fail to realize something important: action is the end result of a process, not the starting point. Let me explain:

Before you can take courageous action, you need to have confidence. Maybe not 100% confidence, but at least enough confidence to move forward. Maybe a better way to think about confidence is conviction. That confidence might be the belief that something has to change, it might be that feeling in your gut that you can’t ignore, or it might be the belief that God is with you as you move forward. Whatever it is for you, it is what you need to take courageous action.

But before we can have confidence, we need something else. We need clarity. We need to get clear on a couple of things before we can feel the confidence required for courageous action. First, we need clarity about our current reality. Where do things stand now? What are the limitations we are facing? Where are the pain points? We need to get clear about where we are in order to move forward. Second, we need clarity about our possibilities. What can we do? What are the options we have moving forward? Once we have clarified our current reality and our future possibilities, we can choose our path forward with confidence.

Clarity + Confidence = Courageous Action.