Hot air ballooning and missed opportunities

Well I’m one step closer to getting in the basket!

Last Sunday we all went down to Birr, Co Offaly to see the hot air balloon festival in action. I have to say it was amazing. There were about ten balloons that took off one after the other, and it really was a spectacle.

It has been on my bucket list for a while to get a hot air balloon experience, and after seeing them last Sunday, it’s definitely something to be done. Now that my family have seen it and are happy that it’s safe, it’s planned for when my eldest, Mark, finishes his junior cert exams!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that there’s no point in hanging around waiting for the perfect moment to take action. Whether that be in business or in personal life. We all have dreams and desires, and want to achieve certain goals, but yet we keep putting them off on the long finger and waiting for the perfect moment to come around. There’s no such thing as the perfect moment.

We miss so much time and we let so many opportunities pass us by. Opportunities show up everywhere, our job is to take action. While it might not be the perfect moment, because we don’t have the time or the money or the staff; we need to take that one step in order to get us closer, in order for the next action that needs to be taken shows up for us. Even though seeing a hot air balloon festival was on my list for a while, it wasn’t until I was handed a newspaper last Wednesday before I gave a talk in Bank of Ireland, that I saw a picture of the festival on the front page. That was my prompt to take action, which I did on Sunday. It wasn’t the perfect moment, I wasn’t getting in the basket myself; but what it did was get my wife and kids to realise that it was safe to have a hot air balloon ride. It got me one step closer to my goal!

Sometimes we get a phone call or have a meeting with someone, we get a flyer or bump into somebody we haven’t seen in a while, which prompts us to take action that will get us closer to our goals. We know we should act on it, but our ‘lesser selves’ tell us the time isn’t right and we start to make all sorts of excuses to talk ourselves out of what we truly need to do to move forward, both personally and in business. But what we need to do is take action and make that one step closer, whatever the circumstances.

Where else are you letting opportunities pass you by? You’ve asked for help to get you closer to your goals, your dreams, your desires, but then you refuse to take it. Life is for living – every single moment of it.

What is the one thing you need to do today that will get you closer to your goal?