THE POWER OF GOING FOR IT

There’s a power in going for it. Do you know this power? Perhaps you know the opposite, the dis- empowerment of hesitating, procrastinating, being indecisive, and/or fear of risk taking. These dis- empowering experiences undermines your sense of power, drains your sense of being efficacious in living your life, and contradicts your empowerment. In these experiences, you are not “going for it.”

Conversely, when you go for it, you take action. You try things. You experiment and then you look to see what worked, what did not, and what you can learn from the experiment. It’s like being in a laboratory— the laboratory of life. In taking a scientific attitude about life, your experiments enable you to figure things out and use the power of continuous improvement. When you “go for it,” you take initiative and this prevents you from getting stuck in the fearful place of waiting until you perfectly understand or until you can avoid all errors, mistakes, and failures.

When you go for it, you also demonstrate that you trust yourself. It is not a matter of trusting that you will always succeed or do it right or perfectly. No. Instead you trust yourself to learn, to figure it out, to adjust, to be flexible, to be resilient, and to make things more and more right. Going for it then is an act of courage and heart. It is a bold move, one that indicates that you believe in yourself and in the future.

The power of going for it means that you don’t have to know it all in order to start. Isn’t that great? And that means, you can start today. You can start where you are by taking small, measured actions, and build up the momentum that you need. The power of going for it also means that you can invent it as you go. This is another discovery that I’ve made from modeling the wealth-creators (in the wealth- creation modeling that I did), modeling the entrepreneurs, and modeling leaders. All three groups of people shared this same quality— they were responsive persons who took initiative, who were proactive in their way of being in the world, and who would go for it when they had a vision that they wanted to actualize.

Test yourself about your personal power of going for it: Do you trust yourself in doing at least something to act on your goal? How often do you stop yourself by procrastinating? When considering stepping out to do something new, how much fear do you experience? Do you let the fear hold you back? What risk-management skills do you have, or do you need? How responsive are you in terms of taking effective action even if it is just a small act?

Obviously, to go for it requires a strong sense of self, a strong sense of your own self-efficacy, a strong

sense of your ability to learn and to flexibly adjust to an ongoing process. The power to go for it arises obviously from your four fundamental powers, from your power of owning your own responsibility, and from your power of resilience.

I learned about this power in my very first NLP Training, it was a phrase that I heard over and over from Richard Bandler. Later when I was just about to complete my Resilience Modeling Project (1994), I presented a workshop at Denver that I titled, “Go for it— Again!” The idea was that in the set back we lose our ability to “go for it,” and that through resilience we are enabled to recover this fundamental power.

Going for it describes the attitude and spirit of an entrepreneur. Men and women who catch a vision and then think through how to make that dream come true have to have the ability to just “go for it.” That is, to take the risk to launch forward and to step up and make the dream come true. Dreaming by itself doesn’t accomplish anything. After the dreams comes the planning, the work, and the discipline of managing yourself through time and many activities so that you can transform the dream into reality. This is self-actualization.

Now a person can “go for it” in an undisciplined way, in a reactive and impatient way. But that’s not a form of personal empowerment. An empowered person “goes for it” accesses the state of patience and mindfulness and then steps forward in a disciplined way to turn great ideas into action. Here then is the paradox and the synergy —you and I need both. We need both the impulse to take action and we need to take action (or “go for it”) after we have thought through our vision and turned into a well-formed outcome.

Healthy and productive going for it then occurs as a synergy. You have to move up the Meaning Axis and generate a great idea and then you have to move out on the Performance Axis to take the initiative. Do both in a balanced way and you create a gestalt of an intelligent going for it.

This is not only what entrepreneurs do, it is a very quality of leadership. Great leaders have this action tendency, this bias for action and initiative. They go for it. They don’t leave their great ideas and visions as mere Business Plans written out in a book or a Vision statement posted on a wall. Those who are highly effective leaders synergy their vision into an action and then go for it as they lead out into the future.