Check out parts one, two, three and four where I talked about the first four steps to recover from a major setback.

All right, so you processed your emotions. You unburdened yourself and faced the fear. You put yourself in a mental and emotional place where you can begin taking action by breaking down your challenges into manageable chunks.

Now it’s time to follow through and get yourself back on your feet.

Step five is to empower yourself with one small action.

This is a key step because the number one thing we lose when we’re feeling down is motivation. There’s just no inspiration to do anything.

You could give the world’s greatest opportunity to somebody with no motivation, and they will do NOTHING with it.

So how do you get your inspiration back?
Simple: get into motion again.
It’s difficult to start moving, but it’s easy to keep moving.

Let’s go back to the debt example from part 4. You may desperately want to get out of that situation. You might have all kinds of logical reasons why your life would be better if you didn’t have that debt load. You might even be terrified of the consequences of having that much debt.

But let’s face it. In spite of all those excellent reasons, taking massive action to overcome the problem is really hard.

However, if you are already doing something, even if it is the most minor of actions, you light a spark. It could be the smallest thing, like creating an Excel spreadsheet listing your creditors and the amount you owe to each of them. Yet just doing that ONE thing makes it a lot easier to fire yourself up – and take bigger and stronger action.

So, after you’ve broken your problem down, focus all of your attention on the first chunk. Then ask yourself a simple question: “what is the smallest action I can take right now?”

Take that one small action, and get some positive momentum going!

The more momentum you build, the faster you will overcome your challenges. Once you start getting some “small wins,” it’s amazing how your depression and anxiety will go away. You will be back on your feet, firing on all cylinders.

These are the five steps that I ALWAYS follow when I suffer a major setback. And you know what? They ALWAYS work. Depending on the situation, each individual step might take an hour, a day, or even a week. But regardless of how long or short each step is, if you do EACH one (no skipping), I know that you will be amazed at how well they work.

It doesn’t matter how serious the failure is. Try this process, and see how strong you become in the face of adversity and how quickly you will move towards greater and greater levels of success!