Searching for that elusive inspiration? You might be stuck in a rut and need to find a way to climb out of it. Maybe there is too much negativity in your life. What kinds of actions can you take to wake up and shake yourself out of hibernation? You can be inspired by implementing empowering action words in your daily life.

Inspiration can be fickle. Some days it’s giving and plentiful, and others it’s hard to find. But inspiration doesn’t have to feel like you’re searching for something that’s out of reach.

The trick is to pick empowering action words that summon positive emotions when you read or hear them. They are not just buzzwords that you add to a resume. To work, they have to be associated with feelings that will motivate you to stand up and take action. Keep a journal so you can jot your ideas down on paper. How will you implement them and use them in your life to bring about great, positive change?

To be inspired, designate one day or one week for each keyword. Get creative and craft some visual representations of these keywords. You can create artwork, frame it and hang it up on the wall to remind yourself to do these actions everyday.

To get you started, below are five empowering action words that you can start implementing right away to be inspired:

1. Discipline

If you are ever going to learn something new, it takes discipline, which means you show up and do the work. It takes self-control not to give up and move onto the next project, but to keep at it and be persistent to achieve results.

Just like in physical exercise, training yourself to do those reps will make you stronger by developing the right muscles. It’s the same with any endeavour, you will only get better with practice. Discipline will inspire you to reach for your goals.

2. Flourish

Flourish is another empowering action word. You want to find ways to grow and develop talents that are useful. To flourish, you need an environment that is conducive to growth, like keeping a plant alive with sunshine, soil and water. Continue to demonstrate discipline and work at getting better at the skill that you want to develop.

You will reach the point where things are happening and you are attaining your goals. This is the time to shine and show everyone what you are capable of. It is empowering to get better at what you, and to develop new skills.

3. Encourage

You have the courage to do something you’ve never done before. Set aside self-doubt and negativity, and recognize your achievements. You will need support, so it helps to have a supportive community who will encourage you to continue to do your best work. Your community will lend you the support you need to grow confident in your work.

Encouragement is essential to keep you motivated in your personal growth. If you ask anyone how they were able to succeed, the answer you’d often get is that they didn’t do it alone, they had someone encouraging them along the way, which kept them on track and inspired them to reach their goals.

4. Nourish

Nourish is another inspiring, empowering action word. Every intention needs to be fed to sustain growth. To keep going, you need to pace yourself and not burn out. It’s not fun to start a project with a lot of enthusiasm only to find out that you’re burning out before you even finish it.

Nourishing your growth includes doing things that will keep the inspiration going. Pause here and take a moment to remind yourself that you are doing this because you have goals and ambitions that are worthy of accomplishing.

5. Socialize

I put this in here because some people are introverted and need encouragement to get out there and network or make new connection.

Social isolation is a problem. Exchanging more than ten words each day with another human being can take some effort, but it’s not impossible. In the past, being an introvert meant that you’d rather not have to put up with the quirks that other people bring, but friendship is valuable. As in the keyword above, all friendships need nourishing. Socialization is an empowering motivator for inspiration.

Final Words

Further steps you can take to get inspired is to create mind maps. By going a step further, you can create phrases from these words, connecting them together to build an action plan.

Creating vision boards, a collage of photos and words that remind you why you have a desire to accomplish something, can be useful to remind you of the ways you can be inspired.

Don’t lose sight of your goal. With a lot of busy-ness going on in your life, you may forget that you have goals you want to accomplish. The vision board can be a daily reminder that you’re reaching for something, and that success is within your grasp.

When you first started on your journey, maybe you were stuck and you haven’t taken any concrete steps towards your goal or didn’t know where to start. Inspiration is out there for you to take, the way to do this is to look for inspiration in unexpected places.

Make these action words part of your vocabulary. Words are powerful, they can change your mindset in positive ways.

Focus on your empowering action words each day, every little step counts and gets you further to attaining your goal.

Repeat the empowering action words everyday to weave them into your life. If you encourage inspiration to show its face with a few empowering action words there’s a lot more that you are capable of than you think.

In the novella The Train Now Departing by Martha Grimes, a woman meets a friend for lunch; he is a travel writer who has been to far-flung locales that the woman only dreams of visiting.

She doesn’t know why she is friends with him when their conversations are fraught with antagonism and he is contemptuous of her meagre existence. She laments the places she will never see, experiences she will never have. The closest that she gets to travelling is visiting the cafe at the train station for breakfast. Her existence is dwarfed by the vastness of the travel writer’s experience but he doesn’t even appreciate the opportunity he has of travelling.

The novella is a study of the opportunities that one misses being a bystander to someone else’s greater purpose.

Have you ever encountered someone who is always on their game, has all the advantages that life has to offer, and even greater success and bountiful opportunities? Sometimes an appreciable percentage of their success is due to luck, but a portion of it is due to opportunities that just flow their way, or more likely, are of their own making.

There’s a high likelihood that these people are opportunists, and this is not meant to be insulting. They are good at recognizing an opportunity when they see it and they don’t hesitate to take advantage of it. This might sound unappealing. It’s understandable. The word “opportunist” has many negative connotations to it. It conjures up the ideas related to “self” that are not pleasing: selfish, self-serving, self-aggrandizing.

But no matter how unappealing, an opportunist who takes advantage does have a point. Most of the time, they are more successful because of it.

I was inspired to write this because I’ve had my fair share of missed opportunities. Being an introvert, there are times when I would not reach out to people even when they offered to give me a call. By not talking to these people, I missed the opportunity to make connections in my professional network.

When I was in graduate school, there were many opportunities to travel, learn, and publish papers, but I didn’t jump on the chance because it didn’t occur to me that I could be successful at it. Also, I didn’t take initiative. Instead I relied on other people to present these opportunities to me, and when they didn’t, I was left out in the cold.

But all that is about to change because I’ve learned from my past mistakes. Now I’m going to have the mindset of an opportunist who doesn’t hesitate to do what it takes to get ahead.

Let me stop right there. It doesn’t mean using people or being manipulative. Being an opportunist is different from being self-serving. It just means that I’m not going to leave success up to chance. It means that I’m going to take charge of my future and make things happen.

You’ve heard of the saying for it: Carpe diem. It means “seize the day.”

How will I do that? After thinking about it, I’ve come up with four conclusions.

1. Being an opportunist requires you to think far ahead into the future

You have to be forward looking and try to predict the future. Every time an event occurs, ask yourself, how can I use this to my advantage? Try to think of actions that you can take that will further your career or your personal achievements.

For example, in retrospect, you wonder how you could’ve missed this opportunity that would’ve helped you now. You didn’t realize what you’ve passed up on until it was too late. Maybe someone offered you a chance to try something, and instead of replying with an enthusiastic “yes!”, you were blase about it and didn’t think it through, leaving the opportunity aside for someone else to step in and capitalize on.

So when the next opportunity comes along, don’t think too hard about it! Just jump on the opportunity.

Here’s another example, relating to businesses.

2. Businesses are successful because they are forward-looking

They jumped on that chance when it presented itself, capitalizing on the moment when all the stars were aligned, where there was no better time than NOW to take advantage.

But sometimes we don’t jump just because we don’t recognize these opportunities.

This is because putting yourself forward is uncomfortable. You’re not used to thinking this way. You’re not used to bragging about yourself, or promoting yourself to other people. But this can translate to a major loss to your own personal growth. By looking for opportunities, it’s not only a chance to get ahead, but to learn and get out of your comfort zone.

3. How to recognize opportunities

You can ask yourself, is this going to help me, either now or in the future? Would I meet more people and make more connections?

With the unbelievably high level of personal and professional competition out there in the world today, it’s even more crucial to be an opportunist. It’s even more urgent to cash in on that wave now.

There’s no greater feeling of disappointment than when you’ve realized too late that you’ve missed the boat, or the train, or whatever method of transportation that would’ve moved you forward a lot faster than walking.

But not to worry. There’s a way to re-create that missed opportunity. First, go back to the moment where the opportunity had presented itself. Is there a way to get reconnected to that person who spoke to you about this fantastic opportunity?

4. Make your own opportunities

Initiative is a major jumping point for success. Maybe you’re a very lucky person whose success was handed to you and you were just a passive participant. But for the rest of us, we have to go looking for opportunities, or create them. We can’t just stand by and let luck find us. It will never work fast enough, or ever happen at all.

No one will tell you how to be successful, or give you a road map to success. They will help you, but you have to point your own way to success and follow through on it.

Show up for success.

To create your own opportunity, do some research. What are the first steps that you can take to set up a situation where you can win more opportunities? Talk to more people. Expand your network to include as many people as possible. Sign up for hobby groups, clubs and events, anything! Just do something.

So far, the reasons I listed sound pretty self-serving. But you have to think of opportunities as a two-way street. By helping others, your acts of kindness can open doors for yourself, too. For example, the person you just helped would’ve remembered this act of kindness, and recommended you to someone else in their network. The karma of paying it forward is returned to you many times over the more you help other people.

This is a call to seize the day, to make things happen instead of passively waiting for all the good things to happen to you.

Instead of watching that train that is now departing, it’s time to run and catch that train. It will get easier to be an opportunist. Pretty soon, you’ll be riding that train to success.

Striving for perfection can make you stop before you even start.

Everyone has these moments: when the voice inside your head tells you that you are not good enough, or that your efforts will be wasted because you can never achieve what you want in life.

Stop listening to that voice!

1. Your voice tells you not to take risks

That voice cares about your ego, which is why it is so persistent. It doesn’t want you to experience failure or setbacks, so it tells you not to even try to achieve your goals. It wants you to experience life in the safest ways, so to cushion the blows, and to make a harsh reality gentler, it talks you out of taking risks.

Sure, it protects you from failure. But not even trying is failure itself. So stop trying to be perfect!

2. We are all flawed

We all have ideals. We all want to be perfect. But that’s not reality. The truth is, we are all flawed. There are things about ourselves that we wish we can improve on or change all together.

I sat on this idea to start a blog, my own business, for about two years. Two years! That’s 730 days that I spent mulling over these ideas without doing anything that would get me closer to achieving my goals. There are lots of ways that that time could have been spent more productively, such as posting weekly or biweekly blogs, building my website and my community, and sharpening my writing skills. But self-doubt and fears of failure took up most of my time.

This paralysis by fear is something that many of you have experienced.

3. Fear is a challenge we all face

Starting this blog was a challenge in itself. Like undertaking any new project, my mind was already focused on failure before I even gave it a chance to live and breathe. There were a lot of fears, a lot of doubts, that got in the way of starting, such as, “I don’t have anything interesting to say,” or “It’s too much work,” and “No one will pay attention to what I write.” These were all valid points.

These were all challenges that many have faced before me. But for every objection that I raised, there were also so many rebuttals. For example, “this could work”. Or, “once I get started, and find my community, I will have lots to say”. Or, “People could find what I had to say to be both interesting, useful, and relatable.”

Beset by fears, I almost talked myself out of even starting. There were times when I asked myself, “Why am I even doing this?” I lost my sense of purpose. I lost sight of all the good things that could come out of starting a blog. Success with what I wanted to achieve felt impossible.

4. We are too comfortable doing nothing rather than do something

All those negative thoughts run through your mind, and they could all be right. By the end of all of your attempts, you can still feel like a failure. But what about all of those other chances where you could’ve been successful? These are equally possible but we tend to overlook these possibilities in favour of the doom and gloom because it’s more comfortable. We talk ourselves out of trying, because it takes such little effort to do nothing in comparison to doing something. Stop listening to negative thoughts and trying to be perfect!

5. Change your mindset about perfectionism

To stop perfectionism from holding you back, you must change your mindset. The path to success begins with the right attitude. Here are four mindset shifts that can set you in the right direction:

1. Failure is an expected part of the process. Remember that any successful venture has seen many iterations that failed before finally finding one that works. So practice resilience. Each blow that knocks you down is another reason for you to get up and try again. Before you throw in the towel, I challenge you to keep going at it even if you’ve suffered a setback.

2. Find your support group, your community, your like-minded people. You need someone to cheer you on when it gets tough, a sounding board for your creative ideas, and a party to celebrate your successes.

3. A calculated risk provides a cushion for failure. Not all risks are created equal. When you’re thinking of taking a risk, make sure it’s one founded in reality and that you have a fallback plan in place so that any potential failure won’t cripple your venture.

4. Don’t expect overnight success. Too many people give up before they start to see a glimmer of the results they were hoping to achieve. Building your own business is not easy but don’t let that deter you because anything worth having is worth the blood, sweat and tears it takes to achieve it.

6. We are our own loudest critics

One success, one step in the right direction, no matter how small, is the boost that keeps you going, your reason for being motivated and showing up each day. It’s easy to get trapped into thinking that the rewards are so insignificant compared to the blood, sweat and tears that went into your project. But it takes a lot of guts to start your own venture, so don’t downplay even the littlest mountain that you conquered.

Without a doubt, we are our biggest and most loudest critics. We set very high, and sometimes very impossible to reach, standards for ourselves. We want to be the best. So instead of using these ideals for self-defeating purposes, why not try to shape these ideals into goals with tiny, attainable steps? We all need the encouragement to just start, so try taking one small step. Chart your progress not just by visualizing the end goal, but by taking count of the steps you took to get there.

7. Our flaws make us all relatable

Don’t hide your flaws; they make you more relatable. Relatability unites you and your audience and gives them a greater reason to listen to you. It’s impossible to be perfect because there’s always room for improvement. Even when you think of someone who appears to be perfect, there’s a great chance that they’re not stopping at where they are, but are always looking for ways to improve and be even better at what they do.