No, this post is not sponsored by Nike. Though if anyone wants to make that happen, don’t let me stop you.
We often reside in our heads. It’s amazing how much time we spend there. Planning. Remembering. Dreaming. Fantasizing. In a good way. In a bad way. An enormous amount of thoughts and stories builds up in our brain – and stays there.
We usually combine this with emotions, feelings. Some stories make us happy, others sad, or angry, frustrated. And then we go back and forth: story triggers emotion – emotion triggers a new or slightly different story, which in turn triggers an emotion.
Sound familiar? You’d like to change jobs (or house or partner, set-up your own business, take a career break). You think about it, talk about, create whole story-lines in your head and heart, get all excited, get all scared. You think, you feel, you think, repeat. But you don’t do anything. You remain in the job, just a bit more unhappy. You remain in the relationship, with just a bit more tension. And the additional emotion, triggers additional stories, and so on and so forth.
I have spent years (yes) dreaming about starting my own business. I was so scared, that I couldn’t even bring myself to fully explore the idea in my head. I would keep the idea as vague as possible, telling myself and others that I wasn’t quite sure yet what it was exactly that I wanted to do. That I needed some more time, some more self-exploration, some more input from my dear friend google. As long as I didn’t really know what it was that I wanted exactly (feel the importance of every word in that sentence as a delaying tactic) I couldn’t start doing anything, could I? So I didn’t. I just became the person that is never really there. I wasn’t really there in my old job – because even though I wasn’t fully clear on what I wanted, I was clear that I didn’t want that anymore (for various reasons). And I wasn’t even really there in my dream.
So how did I get out of that? I started doing. I don’t mean I just got up, quit my job and started my company in one go. But I started taking actions, even when I wasn’t fully clear about the end goal. I started writing blog posts, and actually posting them. And even though no one but my husband read them – it made the energy flow in a completely different way. I started coaching people, creating my business cards, preparing all the paperwork to set-up the company. Small things, big things, but they were all important, because I could start tasting what it would be like, to have my own company.
And then the step to actually dive in, not only became so much smaller – it almost happened automatically. I came to an agreement to leave my old job, I filed the paperwork, and here I am. I only wish I had started acting earlier.
Let me know how things are for you. Are you stuck in the thinking-feeling circle? Need a hand getting into action? Let’s see what we can do!
Nilah Nilah 