I am sure you have been at a point in your life where you were extremely excited to do something. Maybe you wanted to start a new company, start working out or lose weight. The thought of such an accomplishment makes you feel amazing inside. As excited as you are, you say " I'm going to get a good nights rest and start that TOMORROW!" The next day, you wake up only to find something ELSE taking priority. You push it off until the next day. That day turns into a week and then into a month. Before you know it, its a year later and you wish you had started a year ago. So, what do you do?
Overcoming scenarios like this can be easier to do when you are able to understand why you do this. Essentially, we are fighting a war in our head. Two sides of our brain are battling it out to see who wins. On one side, our brain wants to work towards accomplishing our goal(s) while the other side is setting doubt and fears in our mind. The fear of failure, the fear of things being too complicated or possibly the fear of not being perfect goes through our mind. When we starting thinking this way, we will ultimately push it off. After all, there is no imminent danger in not starting, life is comfortable as it is. Right? And honestly, if I am not going to get an instant form of gratification from my efforts, "I'll just wait until tomorrow". That is how we think. In the end, we don't take any action at all because we are afraid of how to proceed.
If you are truly aware of this going on in your mind, there is only one thing to do and that is to stop debating and start doing! Remember how the thought of accomplishing that goal made you feel? You must key into the feeling every time things become hard. If you wait, you will continue to wait because something will get into the way of doing it later. It happens every day. There is nothing stopping you from reaching your goal. Why put it off? Why wait?
The truth is, we are creatures of habit, for better or worse. If you continuously push off something you want to do, you will form a habit in which becomes even harder to break. Your time is now! As Steve Marboli once said,
"Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams... countless echoes of 'could have' and 'should have'… countless books unwritten… countless songs unsung... I want to live my life in such a way that when my body is laid to rest, it will be a well needed rest from a life well lived, a song well sung, a book well written, opportunities well explored, and a love well expressed."
The effort in the beginning is the hardest part. Like pushing a car. The energy needed at first is intense but after you get going, things get a lot easier to keep moving. I have always said, if you do something for 3 weeks, it becomes routine and is much harder to stop, like that moving car. Did you know that about 98% of the people on this planet will dream but never act? Do you want to be the 2% that act or the 98% that continue to do the same thing everyday wishing for a different outcome.
I remember the frustrations I felt knowing I needed to start my capstone project for school. I struggled so much with taking the time to sit down and write the first word. This alone kept me from starting until I finally took the bull by the horns and sat down to write. The beginning was daunting, I felt the worst case of writers block ever but then...Thirty minutes later, words were just flowing out. My momentum was building and I had to harness that momentum in order to keep the project moving forward.
There really is never a better time to get started than now. We only have one life to live. Challenge yourself to push off the fear of failure (as long as you don't quit and continue to move towards your goal, you will not fail) and perfection and just get started! Don't overanalyze it... if the task feels like too much, break it up into smaller tasks. If you take action, it will build up like the momentum of a train. If you take no action at all, you give your brain the memory to say no again tomorrow. I can not stress enough that you are going to take action, RIGHT NOW. If all else fails, instead of letting fear hold you back, allow the potential regret of not acting push you forward because if you don't act, you will regret it.
It's go time!!!