You need to take stock of your life right now. You need to look around your life and consider what results you’re currently getting. Are you happy with your life and your results? Is it good? Bad? Indifferent? Appalling? Are you pleased? Displeased? Just satisfied? Not satisfied? Unhappy? Disappointed?

Without acknowledging where you are right now you have little to no chance of improving things.

Your life might be at the top of a mountain peak right now but are you looking forward to scaling further heights or are you threatening to throw yourself off the highest peak? You might be sat comfortably in your canoe but unbeknown to you, you may be careering towards a perilous waterfall. Unless you sit up, look around and acknowledge what’s going on in your life right now you can’t doing anything about it.

Most people do nothing about their lives until it’s too late. They carry on under-performing in their jobs until they are made redundant because of “poor market conditions”. They eat unhealthily until they get taken ill and then they blame “their genes”. They spend little or no quality time with their children until their children disown them and then they blame the “bad crowd” that they got in with.

Taking stock means taking stock of what is. Be honest. Look around. Take it all in. Imagine that you’re a visitor to your life. What would you see, think and feel about this life? Would you see this person as successful or not? Would you want their life for your own or could they keep it? What advice would you give to them?

Honesty is critical for the success of this exercise. If you’re not honest with yourself, what chance do you have? Let’s face it if you aren’t honest with yourself, can you really expect anyone else to be?

You’ve probably seen The X Factor on television. It’s one of those programmes that I sometimes like to like and that I sometimes like to hate. I dig the competitive element of it and the fact that you only get through to the later stages if you really are good. Life is like that; watch it and realize the truth.

If you don’t step up and take action, if you don’t step up and perform, you will be wiped out!

But then there are the people who cannot sing. Some of them are clearly disturbed and need psychological help. I don’t think that’s funny. We shouldn’t laugh at people less fortunate than ourselves.

But there is a third group; people, who in other areas of their lives are probably perfectly well grounded but who have a delusion that they can sing. For many people, their own voice is the sweetest thing that they will ever hear so it is not surprising that they think that they sound like the next rock star!

What is more worrying perhaps is that their friends, family and peers never told them that they sounded like an asthmatic tom cat on the prowl before they entered the competition. As I said before, few people in life will be honest with you. Few people will tell you that you suck. Few people will tell you that you are not motivated and that you need to give yourself a resounding kick up the ass.

You have to be honest with yourself or you have no chance. Go on, take a visit with yourself right now. Take stock of your motivation levels. If they’re not up to scratch join me in looking at what you can do to motivate yourself more consistently right now…

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