GarthBox

There’s a secret way fear speaks out to keep you safe, to prevent you from taking a risk, from putting yourself out there.

It involves the feeling of being busy.

There’s a dopamine release when someone acknowledges that you appear slammed.

Being busy makes us feel needed, valued, and preemptively appreciated.

But the busy we’re being isn’t moving the meaningful work forward. It’s not playing on the edges of “What if.” And it’s definitely not requiring any emotional labor.

Spending time and investing it are two different things.

Unfortunately, appearing that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew takes precedence over actually biting off more than we can chew.

Stay Positive & Watch Out For It

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Buy In: Before execution, you have to have buy in from all the right stakeholders. It might hurt your timeline to get it, but not having buy in and needing to change things down the road will hurt the timeline more.

Permission: There are two types of audiences you’re working with. Those you want permission from and those you have permission from. Be sure your ideas don’t try to impact two vastly different audiences at once.

The Ask: When in doubt, you can ask. Ask for what you need, ask about ideas outside of scope, ask about changing the timeline, ask questions that give you greater insight into your target.

Stay Positive & Questions Save More Time Than Answers Do

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If you think about it, everything that can be done by a single person has already been done.

Everything new requires a team.

Whether you’re working close with a partner or you’re filling your significant other in (and getting some kind words of encouragement in return) at the end of the day, it’s a team effort.

While it can sometimes lead work to get stuck or set back, there’s no better action than you can take than to let them know (whoever “them” is for your project).

Alas, know that this is different than asking for permission or seeking reassurance prior to taking an action.

Better to let them know you’ve leaped, what you’ve done, what you’ve learned, what you’ve completed ahead of schedule, what you’re struggling with, what you fear and what excites you.

The more you let them know and the more they let you know, the more you can help each other.

Proactive communication is key.

Stay Positive & More (Communication) The Merrier

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The best reaction to a challenge you can have is to completely disregard.

Disregard the fear and anxiousness of diving in.

Disregard those who don’t think you can accomplish the task.

Disregard the external naysayers, and the internal one.

To have complete disregard is quite possibly the best way to not discount the work that needs to be done.

Responsibility can stay. The rest can be disregarded.

Stay Positive & In Kind Regards

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Intuition is often referred to as trusting your gut or a gut reaction.

But that reaction doesn’t come out of nowhere.

It comes from your observation of systematic results (read: patterns).

Intuition is an art in the sense of needing to have more experiences, but it’s a science in that the more we experience, the better we get at recognizing and reacting to problems without needing to think about them.

Stay Positive & All You Need Is More Practice

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The stuff that matters the most is often out of your control.

However, that’s not to say the best path forward is to focus your attention on something completely under your control, but away from what matters.

There are subtle ways you can influence the uncontrollable.

By showing up again and again, by being generous, by taking small steps you can make an impact that results in a win-win for you and what you can’t control.

Don’t be turned off by the difficulty or lack of immediate results, we need you to be in it for the long run.

Culture doesn’t change over night.

Stay Positive & It’s A Thankless Job (But Necessary)

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Outlines are scary.

Not in the difficulty of making them kind of way – that’s quite easy. What makes outlines scary is the responsibility one has to deliver on an outline once it’s shared.

To make an outline means you have a plan and you can’t use the easy excuse of not having direction to hide from doing the work.

Outlines are necessary, though. We can never get to where we’re going if we don’t know where to go, which direction or how quickly we ought to get there.

What has always helped me is knowing that I can change the outline along the way. You’re not locked in with an outline, but you are accountable for seeing one through in one way or another.

Stay Positive & Line By Line

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