There are different ways in which we avoid taking action towards the things we want to achieve. Sometimes we get stuck in analysis paralysis. Sometimes we engage in busyness, or activities which are not high priority. Sometimes we got back to the drawing boards and think we’re completely off the mark. Or we let our perfectionism reign and fine tune minute details over and over and over again.
There are infinite routes we can take in order to avoid taking the route we actually want to take. And equally there are many things we can do in order to overcome our resistance to doing what we deep down know we want to be doing. We can build new habits, we can work on our discipline, we can put together a simple but effective plan, we can take small but consistent actions, we can ask for help.
But sometimes the best way to get somewhere is not by getting there but by making sure that we’re not getting to other places.
But often a more efficient and sustainable way of overcoming stuckness is not by adopting new habits, but by getting rid of old models of thinking. In other words, it’s not about looking for a new way, but of removing what’s on the way.
If we’re trying to move from A to B, from our life as it is to a new form of life, there are two broad reasons why we aren’t taking action: either A is holding onto us too strongly, or B isn’t pulling us strong enough. Let’s assume that someone is stuck about starting a podcast. Some of the reasons for that may be:
- The appeal of running a podcast is not as strong as the fear associated with doing so.
- They doubt their skillset and ability to make a success of it.
- Having a podcast will require them to give up something that they’re not ready to give up, e.g. money, time with their family, comfort of having not failed.
And at the bottom of all of this is a subconscious idea about our goal or ourselves in the context of our goal that we feel threatened by. We may feel that we’ll lose something we can’t afford to lose by working toward our goal, or that what we want to accomplish hides risks we aren’t seeing. There is some form of safety we believe we’d be giving up by engaging in what we want to achieve.
Identifying the threat we think our goal would be exposing us to is how we can overcome the resistance to taking action. One way of doing this, is asking ourselves what assumptions we must be making that create the fear we associate with our goal. The most insidious and paralysing assumptions are normally about ourselves. As we explore this, it helps to remember that the assumptions are always false – they are fears, made up and founded in our limiting beliefs about ourselves and life.