Famous actor Jonah Hill just dropped a Netflix documentary on his favorite head-shrinker, Phil Stutz. It’s a great watch! While Free Life Coach believes that wisdom ought to be free, we fully support LICENCED therapists. Life Coaches are not licensed therapists, they are people who want to charge you money to share lessons they learned by living.
Stutz is a charming guy and I loved the wisdom he shares in the film. It’s all stuff we’ve heard before, but repackaged in a fresh light. For example, he has an exercise on feeling gratefulness.
The beneficial effects of practicing gratitude are well known. And that’s just one of the many pearls of wisdom Stutz shares.
Speaking of pearls, Stutz also talks about what he calls a “String of pearls.” The string of pearls is to assemble your day into actions, one after the other. This concept of taking the next right action is really helpful to me and it’s something I’ve known about for a long time.
I often feel overwhelmed and exhausted by life. I don’t always know what I should be doing “with my life” on the grand scale. But I do know what the NEXT RIGHT ACTION is. It’s usually doing the dishes. Always the f#cking dishes.
But even when the dishes are done, there’s another next right action I can take. Here are some examples:
Call a friend and tell them something funny, (or tell them I love them if they can handle that kind of talk.)
Do laundry.
Cook something.
Tidy up a room.
Write a Free Life Coach. (I love doing this for some reason.)
Write something else.
Read a book.
Do ten pushups. (Never gonna happen.)
My point is, there is always a small action I can take that’s a “right” action. How do I know a right action from a wrong one? It’s all down to which one makes me feel better after I’ve done it. Here are some of my favorite wrong actions:
Read yet another “Am I the asshole” post on Reddit.
Have another handful of chocolate-covered raisins.
Scroll through the news.
Chew my nails while I worry about something.
None of those items on the top list are done after I’ve done something on the bottom list.
Here’s another thing about the next right action, little ones add up to big ones, while the next wrong actions never add up to anything. For example, I’ve written several unpublished novels and unmade screenplays. I didn’t write any of them in one sitting, I wrote them a little bit at a time. And the biggest trick was to NEVER think about the outcome, like selling them or being successful.
If you’re working on something like a novel or a business plan or some crazy big plan that would be nice to have but is too scary or exhausting to complete, just eat that cake one bite at a time. No action matters more than any other: treat them all the same. Try it now. Take one tiny, right action toward something you’ve been dreaming of doing.
Acceptance and doing the next right thing always works out beautifully