Your Heart and Soul Yearns To Do More Yet You Keep Shooting Yourself In The Foot

I have a friend who works a 9 to 5 in the financial sector and mentioned to me that he is sick of his job and wants to quit.

He said what he really wants to do is write books.

I enthusiastically responded, “that’s awesome — what are you working on?”

He answered “nothing at the moment. I’m looking into a few things right now but I have a few prospects on the horizon.”

In my mind, I sighed and said “uh oh, I know where this is headed.” 🤐

Unfortunately for him, it was headed nowhere because I knew what his vague response signaled: he had no idea where to begin to make his desire of writing books a reality.

And unfortunately, he likely will never get started.

Overthinking The Process of Creating Change

Like many of us at times, my friend is overthinking and overcomplicating the process of creating change in his life.

It caused me to ponder the following:

• Why is it that anytime we want to create a shift in our life, we become paralyzed?
• Why do we psych ourselves out when we come up with an idea that excites us but requires big change?
• Why are we conditioned to view any undertaking that diverts from our status quo as extremely difficult?
• Why is it when we close our eyes and envision a life we truly desire we dismiss it as mere fantasy?

This a byproduct of the prevailing thought plaguing society that says we need to be “realistic” with our goals which cause us to play small.

2 Reasons We Overthink Our Goals

1. Our rational mind can’t fathom how we will make such a big leap from where we are today to where want to be in the future. We’re too locked into the person we are right now — seeing the situation from our current identity and not realizing we actually have to start planting seeds to become someone new.
2. We fall prey to the curse of “how” — obsessing over having all the answers upfront on how we will achieve our goal. We view the path to our goal as a straight line, not realizing there will be many direction changes, twists, and turns along the way. We’re never going to have all the answers and this prevents us from getting started.

Let’s break down each of these points and apply them to my friend.

1. Since he has been working many years crunching numbers all day, becoming an author of books seems like a flat-out crazy proposition to his rational mind. All he’s ever known is working a 9-5 corporate job, so doing anything else seems unfathomable because he’s judging the process from who he knows himself as in this moment today. He’s focused on his current reality which causes him to deem anything that stretches beyond that box as an unrealistic goal.
2. He’s focused on the 90% of crap of his goal. Meaning, he believes he needs to do endless research on how to become an author, find the right idea to start writing about, build a website, secure a publisher, or do a whole host of other irrelevant and useless tasks that only waste time and prevent him from making any real progress.

Simplify!
My two cents for him and anyone else looking to create any type of change in their lives but isn’t making moves: stop overcomplicating the process.

Get out of your head and stop shooting yourself in the foot. Simplify by just getting started and do something every day that moves your goal forward in the tiniest of ways.

Do that for a while then let’s talk. 😉