Taking An Online Program or Course is The Worst Thing You Can Do If You Are Really Serious about Your Big Hairy Audacious Dream

I see so many people who have Big Hairy Audacious Dreams (BHADs) make this mistake: they invest time and money in one online course after another or one certification program after another

… at the expense of working on their BHAD.

They do this because there is a very loud voice in their head that is telling them that they don’t know enough or aren’t qualified enough or don’t have the right credentials. They are convinced that they need more knowledge or more letters behind their name before they can take any action on their BHAD.

I get it. I invested more than $11,000 in online programs in 2021 and 2022. I invested in so many programs in such a short period of time that I didn't have time to start, let alone finish, one before I signed up for the next bright shiny program that I convinced myself I HAD to enroll in.

Now, I am not putting down education or professional development or coaching certification programs. I have learned a tremendous amount and grown a lot from the five online programs I’ve invested in.

What I AM saying is that for most people with BHAD’s, investing thousands of dollars in one online program after another is simply a lame-ass excuse for not working on their Big Dream, for putting their Big Dream on the back burner.

It was for me.

Did I really need James Wedmore’s Business By Design before I could start my coaching business when I had run my own consulting company for over 35 years? Did I absolutely have to take Melissa Henault’s LinkedIn Method Academy before I could create my profile and start posting content on LinkedIn? Probably not.

Professional development is often a form of procrastination. Your BHAD requires you to step out of your comfort zone and that’s a very scary place to be. Your BHAD requires you to do things you’ve never done before which is very uncomfortable.

If you are like many of us who have Big Dreams, when you get uncomfortable, when you start to doubt yourself, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that you need more knowledge before you can step outside your comfort zone.

So, you go looking for an online course that will finally make you feel like you are good enough, know enough, and are qualified enough to do what you want to do.

What I know now from my own experience, is that taking yet another online course is not going to make it any easier to do uncomfortable things, to keep going when you encounter a setback or hit an obstacle, to ignore the voice of self-doubt inside your head that is telling you that you don’t have what it takes to succeed.

What IS going to make it easier to wholeheartedly go after what you really want is to get in shape mentally.

If you decided that you were going to run a marathon, you wouldn’t just show up on race day without having done any training, would you?

Yet, that’s exactly what we do when we decide to go after our BHAD. We are trying to do something that is by definition, scary, risky, and decidedly outside our comfort zone with a brain that is wired to keep us safe IN our comfort zone.

Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” What this means for us Big Dreamers is that we cannot achieve our BHAD by allowing the part of our brain whose sole job is to keep us safe in our comfort zone to continue to control our thinking.

That’s why mental fitness training is so critical to our success. Mental fitness training teaches us how to stop letting the part of our brain that is sabotaging us at every turn run the show. It teaches us how to access the part of our brain that is going to help us achieve our BHAD not hinder us.

I’ll be talking about what mental fitness training is and why it is so important at a webinar I am doing this Thursday at 5:00 pm PT. I hope you’ll join me.

Click here to save your seat: https://www.ajriedel.com/webinar-reg

If you are serious about pursuing your BHAD, attending this webinar is the single most important thing you can do for yourself.