Life Lesson

You can attempt to plow right through it, but no doubt more will add up before you can catch up.

You can let it continue to grow, but that usually puts you in a bind, too.

Or you can prioritize the log and ask for help.

The only shame in it is the shame you bring, but if you leave that at home, the work can get done and you can get back to investing your time on meaningful work.

Stay Positive & The More Help The Marrier

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There’s something relieving about adding “V1” to the end of a project name, file or email.

It gives you permission to accept that it may not be perfect.

It gives you reassurance that the person or people on the receiving end of it will understand that there’s more to come and more room for improvement.

Heck, they may even weigh on on how you can make it better.

I bring it up because we hurt ourselves when we don’t mark things as V1 and respect that meaningful change is made over time with multiple versions and tweaks and improvements.

Stay Positive & Free Yourself From Perfection Expectations

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You can react to someone. It’s usually snappy and your answer isn’t always right or what they want. Reactions use judgement and stereotypes and shortcuts for the sake of speed.

You can also respond to someone. It’s usually more thought out. You’ve processed the event and can act and feel better about it. There’s often flow in a response, but it may not always be right.

You can also see and hear someone. It usually means you’re asking another question, repeating the request and truly listening. It requires empathy and removing your internal dialogue and ego from the situation. Your action is usually right because it’s about them and not you.

If you think about yourself being in the situations above–the one who is being reacted to or responded to or seen and heard–can you imagine in which space you’d prefer to be?

Stay Positive & Others Are Just The Same

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Believe it or not, watching motivational videos isn’t what gives you confidence.

Promising others that you’ll take a specific action doesn’t give you confidence either.

Nor does being completely prepared.

They all might give you hope and encouragement, but not confidence.

The only way to have confidence is to do something you think a confident person would do because confidence is the result of an action taken – it doesn’t precede it.

Stay Positive & Enjoy The Outcome

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Then list absolutely everything you have to do to make that project you’re working on succeed.

If the evaluation isn’t enough to get you to stop moving forward, then certainly seeing how long of a list it ends up being will.

If you want to get unstuck, it pays to prioritize, to focus on a few key to-dos.

Having a few enables you to select a combination of easy (drip, drip, drip) tasks and larger scarier ones (the leaps, if you will).

And if you’d like to get stuck there too, either select all easy tasks or all massive undertakings.

Crazy to consider just how easy it is to get stuck.

Crazier yet to realize all it takes to get unstuck is action.

Stay Positive & One Step After The Other

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Fear and shame and vulnerability don’t arrive so you can run from them.

Nothing meaningful would get done if you did that.

Rather, they arrive to remind you that you’re onto something.

The best action you can take is to dance with the resistance.

Sure, it might step on your toe while you tango, but if that’s what you need to go through to make the change you seek then it sounds like a worthy trade-off to me.

Stay Positive & One, Two, T-A-N-G-O

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The thing about the gauntlet is that the more you go through it, the better you get.

The other thing about the gauntlet is that once you stop, once you’re out, it’s quite scary to get back in and it’s unlikely you’ll pick up from where you left off.

So they say, if you’re going through hell, keep on going.

Stay Positive & Hopes Up High, Head Down Low

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