10 Stages of Action To Achieve Your Goals

Actions speak louder than words. It is a cliché, but very true. Your actions will determine the results you get in life. A tension arises when you have a desire, and your results are not matching this desire. It is increasingly frustrating when you try to change the results without looking at the input. The input are the actions. What are you doing to achieve your results? This is the question you need to ask yourself. Otherwise, you will be in a vicious self-sabotaging cycle, where your results are not matching with your desires. Your results will always match your actions; therefore, you need to focus on your actions and make adjustments to get different results. 

For many of us, we already know what to do, we just aren’t doing what we know to do. We are stuck in the “knowing” stage and for some reason, no matter how hard we push, we can’t move to the “doing” stage. And those of us who do get there, don’t stay there long enough to make a dent in achieving our goals. We flip-flop around and spend too much time doing “busy work”, because the pull of the “knowing” stage, or in other words our comfort zone is too much to resist. In the “doing” is where we pick up momentum and find our flow, so if our time there is short, we slow our progress and get frustrated because the results are not consistent and our goals take longer to achieve. We need to understand the importance of our actions, especially our daily actions and how they fit within the grand scheme of achieving our goals. We also need to understand how to monitor, interrogate and keep our actions in check, so that we spend more time “doing” and less time “knowing”.

Interrogate your actions. One of the questions I get asked often is how do I interrogate my actions? Interrogation will be effective once you become clear on your goal. Knowing what you want to achieve is a part of the puzzle. From there you must become conscious of your results. The next step is understanding how you do things and the reason behind them. Ultimately, you want to determine if your results are moving you closer to your goal and if not, ask yourself, what am I doing everyday? There are many tools you can use to help yourself during this process of discovery. One of which is a simple task and time audit. Track your activities and time for two weeks to see what you do and the duration of each task. When done correctly, people are often astonished that their actions are nowhere near what they believe them to be. At the beginning of the exercise you may believe that you are doing everything right and nothing is paying off, only to realise at the end of the exercise that you are always busy doing tasks that do not move the lever forward to achieving your goal. You may be stuck on the hamster wheel or maybe you are just a busy bee. In other words, your results are not showing all the effort and work you claim to be doing everyday. The task and time audit will reveal to you the percentage of goal achieving tasks you do every day. It will allow your actions to speak louder than your words. 

Now What?

You now realise that you were more talk than action. And you need to increase your goal achieving actions. I have found that there are 10 key stages of action. Seven of the stages I gathered from Donald Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things and three of them I came up with. I must point out that Norman’s seven stages of action were intended for everyday things, therefore things you probably already know how to do. For simple goals therefore it is a no-brainer, but for big audacious goals that you have no idea how to accomplish, it will be harder to sequence the actions needed to achieve them. I believe in having audacious goals that scare you and impress you. And taking into consideration the purpose of Norman’s seven stages of action, I have beefed them up for my purposes and now I am sharing them with you. Together we can now walk the talk and achieve more. 

There are 10 stages of action. The 10 stages of action explains the mind-set of an individual as they perform tasks. They are broken down into five stages of execution and five stages of reflection. The latter five stages are key, because many of us fail to reflect and evaluate our actions to get lessons for future actions. Collectively, the 10 stages are a good way to start reflecting daily on how you move from “knowing” to “doing”, because some people do not consider how they move from one stage to another. Resulting in a disorderly mind and so there is no order in their actions. They think that because they have a goal, they will automatically achieve it, or that they will automatically do the tasks required to achieve the goal. They mistake busy work with goal achieving tasks. The 10 stages of action will therefore help you to start reframing how you approach each day to achieve your goal. 

Walk the Talk

Taking the principles explained here and applying them to your life, will help you to understand how to move from “knowing” to “doing”. Use it to keep yourself accountable and demand of yourself adherence to each step so that you flow through and move from your comfort zone to achieving your goal. 

For each of the 10 stages of action,  ask yourself a question or series of questions to get to the core of your goal, the process and outcome. The questions are to help you move beyond the superficial to something deeper that will arouse emotions needed to drive your desire and fuel your actions towards achieving the goal. 

Execution Stages:

Stage 1: Deciding the goal. What do I want and why do I want it? 

Stage 2: Paying the price. Am I willing to do what is required? 

Stage 3: Sequence of actions. What options are available to me?

Stage 4: Intention to act. Am I ready to make a decision?

Stage 5: Execution of the actions. What can I do right now? 

Reflection Stages:

Stage 6: Conscious actions. Are my actions goal achieving?

Stage 7: Perceiving the stage of the world. What happened?

Stage 8: Interpreting the perception. What does it mean?

Stage 9: Evaluating the outcome. Is it a good outcome? Am I happy with it?

Stage 10: Lessons learned. What can I take away from this experience? What can I do better?

During the execution stages you must determine the intention of your goal and scan the environment to understand the position your goal will have in the landscape. You need to be honest with yourself and determine whether the goal is something you are willing to go the extra mile for. At this point, you may find that your initial goals fall away, as the realisation hits you that you will need to exert the same amount of energy for a small goal as you would an audacious goal. The fact is that, if you already know how to achieve your goal, you need to think bigger. Thinking bigger may scare you, because it is impossible to know the steps to take. Even if you look at the path of successful people, their steps will not be your step. Therefore, I believe that you only need to know the first step. And take that first step towards your goal. 

An important part of the process is the reflection stage. Self-reflection is key to your success. Finding lessons that can help you on your journey will save you a lot of trouble. Knowledge is knowing what to do, wisdom is doing what you know to do. Taking action is key to achieving your goals. It requires moving from a state of “knowing” to “doing”. Very few of us master this transition and are able to stay in the “doing” for long periods of time, to the point where it matters and provides the momentum we need to go forward. These 10 stages will help you to become conscious of the actions you take and make improvements as you master your journey. 

[This is an article I published on Linkedin in 2022]