Change Your Life with These 6 Actions - Success Sculpting Show Podcast

Change Your Life with These Six Types Of Success Actions

Today’s episode is going to discuss the different types of actions that are available that can change your life and accelerate your success. There is so much more to taking action than just going out and doing something and that’s what the focus of this episode is all about.

Let’s Talk About Cause and Effect

Actions can be put into different categories with the understanding that if you take a certain action you’ll achieve a certain result. The action can cause a problem or it can cause an opportunity and you generally don’t take an action that is going to cause a problem. Every problem and opportunity has some kind of effect associated with it.

There are things you need to take into consideration when dealing with cause and effect. For example, planting an acorn is supposed to equal an oak tree. This is the cause and effect, but if you plant an acorn in the desert you’re not going to get an oak tree.

What I want to focus on is particular actions that relate to ‘cause problems and effects’ and ‘opportunities and effects’.

Hindsight is 20/20

When you consider hindsight you’re looking at an action you took that caused something to happen. This action may have caused a certain problem and you had to take what is called a corrective action. You can change your life by taking a corrective action to make sure you don’t repeat or start developing a pattern. One of the first actions you need to take is corrective action.

If you look in hindsight and you see there is a certain effect that has already taken place because of something you’ve done or something someone else has done, you’ll need to take what is called an adaptive action. You can change your life by taking an action to adapt to certain effects that have already taken place. An example of an adaptive action that you see all the time are changes in technology and the internet.

Corrective action and adaptive action are two actions you use based on hindsight and the can change your life.

To summarize you use corrective action to prevent that cause from happening again and you use adaptive action to adapt to what is changing in your environment based on effects that have taken place.

There are other actions you need to look at also. You can look into the future and take preventative action. This is where you ensure certain things won’t happen. You can also take contingency action.

Contingency action can change your life because it’s based on foresight and taking action on what might happen. Below is an example of contingency action.

You walk into an office building and you see a no smoking sign. In terms of action, the no smoking sign is a preventative action. It is to prevent people from smoking in the building and causing a fire. If someone decided they were going to smoke in the building and a fire took place, there are fire extinguishers in the building. The existence of the fire extinguishers is the contingency action. What if the fire took place? The existence of automatic sprinklers is an example of adaptive action because the environment will automatically adapt to the fire and smoke in the building and trigger the sprinklers.

There are two more actions that can change your life that I want to discuss and these are promoting actions and exploiting actions.

Promoting actions are something that you proactively and deliberately do to promote an opportunity of some kind. This could be to sell a product, generate more sales, get more customers or more partners. Promoting action is where you take a specific action while looking to promote an opportunity.

When you look at the opportunity, what are the effects of the opportunity that you can actually exploit? Exploiting action, in this instance, is in a positive way. Look at Disney for example. Disney puts out a movie and if the movie does really well, they exploit the movie. The characters from the movie show up in Disneyland and in stores with products ranging from coloring books, action figures, clothing and more.

Athletes are another good example of this. Athletes who have top performances are exploited by different marketing companies. Michael Jordan was exploited by Nike. Maria Sharapova is exploited by Canon. What it all means is that you get the maximum mileage out of the opportunity and the effects of the opportunity. It is not a negative thing when we use exploiting actions.

You use proactive action to promote an opportunity and then you use exploiting action on its effects.

Again, let’s look at sports. Nike didn’t create Michael Jordan. He used promoting action to put him into the superstar category. The marketing companies then arrived on the scene to exploit his prestige, to exploit his image and to exploit his top performance for the benefit of helping them grow their own companies.

Now you have six different actions that you can use to change your life:

Change your life with Corrective actions
Change your life with Adaptive actions
Change your life with Preventative actions
Change your life with Contingency actions
Change your life with Promoting actions
Change your life with Exploiting actions

Corrective actions are actions that you choose to make sure you don’t create the same cause over again. These actions are based on hindsight. Adaptive actions are actions that you choose to adjust and adapt to certain effects that have already taken place. Both of these actions are based on hindsight.

Preventative actions are actions to prevent a certain cause from happening. Contingency actions are actions that are based on the ‘what if’. Both of these actions are based on foresight or looking into the future.

Promoting actions are actions that look to create opportunities that you can then leverage using exploiting actions.

Can you see how all these actions are tied together and how you can use them for your business success? It is not just one specific action that you need to take but several different kinds of actions depending on what is happening.

We all interact with our environment. We interact with other people and if you can understand that you’re not limited to certain things and that you do have a selection of actions you can take relative to what is going on, then you can better exploit the things that are going on. You can also better adjust to things and have tremendous success in your life.

In the context of success actions and how they relate to your circumstances, please review and answer these 10 questions.

When considering what action to take in your business do you look at the effects before choosing the action?
In relation to your business success what corrective actions could you now put in place?
What adaptive actions could you choose to take to ensure your business success?
Looking towards your future success what preventative actions do you need to take?
Again looking towards your future success, what contingency actions should you take?
What promoting actions can you take right now in your business to ensure success?
Are there any exploiting actions that you can take right now to further your success?
Taking a good look at your business and personal life what actions do you need to take to make things work?
How can you tie all 6 actions together to formulate an action plan that will inevitably lead to your success?
What is the very first action you’re going to take right now?

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