We’re coming to the end of the first month of the year. Most of us have recovered from holiday festivities hangovers. The kids have been packed off to school, and right about now a lot of people are rethinking all those grand promises they made to themselves of new beginnings and doing great things in the coming year.
It’s quite common to break your own promises to yourself. It goes: At the beginning of the year, you’re on the starting blocks, raring to go, itching to take off into the spectacular future you see for yourself.
Then, all manner of obstacles and challenges and unexpected nasty surprises present themselves on the racetrack that is life. Basically, maisha is throwing you off your game plan. So you pause, step off the starting blocks, and step back to pace about and think, or rather rethink, your grand plans. Only we don’t call it rethinking; we call it getting ready.
The problem with getting ready, despite all the good press it gets, is no one ever is. More so if you’re getting ready to do something you’ve never done before.
This reluctance to do that which is completely new to you is understandable. It’s not easy to leave behind what you know to do what you don’t know, or as Robert Kiosaki put it, ‘Find your comfort zone, then leave it’, but you have to.
‘One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.’ – André Gide.
The thing about losing sight of the shore is we’re talking open seas, and we know what that means: choppy, dicey and uncomfortable vast oceans and, therefore, a reasonable expectation that there will be a fair bit of loss of control.
We see this uncertain future that lies ahead and we freak out. All of a sudden, those great things we had envisioned don’t seem possible. We’re scared, naturally, but we don’t admit as much. Instead, we pretend we’re not ready and put in a great deal of energy coming up with all sorts of reasons why we can’t do it: I don’t have enough money, no time what with my day job, the environment is not right for my idea, and so on.
You could very well be correct about not having enough money, or the time, or the environment not being right, but it’s this simple: If you’re serious about going after what you really want, you’ll find a way. If you’re not, you’ll find an excuse.
‘In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.’ – Abraham Maslow.
It may feel like you’re not capable of getting what you set out to do because it’s hard or rough and it will be, or you fear the overwhelmingly large tasks and challenges ahead but it’s like moving into a bigger house.
At first there’s all this empty space on account of the little furniture you came with from your old little place, but before you can say lickety-split and the echo gets back to you, you’ll have filled the place with furniture. However big the space we move into, we tend to fill it. But first, you’ve got to move, step forth and grow.
For if you want more, you have to become more.
