3 Must-Hear Takeaways

1. Diligence requires effort that we generate ourselves.
2. We have to be prepared to "Go Pro" with our diligence.
3. To achieve diligence you need to assess your current reality, implement a system and commit to yourself.

Season 5 of the Cultivation Podcast! This season is all about words to live by and this episode's word is "Diligence". Tom will talk about how diligence requires grit, fortitude, the determination to complete a task.

Diligence is a steady, earnest and energetic effort; devotion or painstaking work; application to accomplishing an undertaking. To be a diligent person, you will need all the steps, information, and processes but the one thing you can't get is the diligence or effort to get the thing done.

No one can give you that thing, you have to dig deep within yourself. And, nothing is going to determine the outcome more than the amount of effort you put into it.

There will be moments where we hit a wall and our expertise will end. That's when it will require additional effort to learn and grow so we can go to the next level. We call it "Going Pro", that is where we put in professional effort for a professional result.

Maybe your effort has been subpar, but the beauty is that because your effort is from you, you have complete control. Today you can decide to Go Pro and up your effort.

Here are steps to increase our effort in any area of our life:

• Assess your current reality - are you where you could, should or want to be? Get honest with yourself. Most people don't put in the effort because they don't want to admit they are not where they want to be.
• Implement a system - set a routine, schedule your time in a calendar to build a structure of diligence. Those can be really simple and elementary until it becomes the norm.
• Commit to yourself - Don't allow any distractions, don't allow others' emergencies to disturb you. Tell yourself these are rocks in your schedule that you are going to do the work and make time to exert effort so you can build that diligence.

I can't put in the effort for you, you can't put in the effort for me. It's on each of us to find the effort to build the diligence that will take us to the next level.