“Someday, I’ll …,” is a phrase I hear a lot. Heck, I’ve said this myself on many occasion. But I’ve learned that when it comes to pursuing our calling, ‘someday’ will never get here. The best thing for our calling is to just start.
Little Worrier
The trouble is that the little worrier in our brain, the part of us that wants to keep us safe, will try to prevent us from doing anything too risky. This little worrier is a sneaky little devil too. It will give us all kinds of reasons why it will never work, why Aunt Ruth two generations removed won’t approve, and why all our friends will laugh at us for even trying.
If this doesn’t work, then this little worrier will argue that if we’re going to try it anyway, it has to be perfect. Either way, there’s no risk. Either we don’t try at all, or we give a perfect performance. If we give the perfect performance and it still fails, well then nobody could make it succeed, so we’re not to blame.
Ultimately, though, having to be perfect in our attempt is pretty intimidating, so we’re likely to stop before we even start – which is what our little worrier wanted us to do in the first place. So we stay stuck at the front side of our calling wondering if we should even take that first step.
Crafty
To overcome this, we have to be crafty and sneak by ‘little worrier’. One of the best ways to do this is to change the way we look at it. Here are a couple ways around ‘little worrier’.
1. We can view it as a trial run or a dress rehearsal.
We’re doing this the first time, so we’re just going to start with a dress rehearsal attitude. Of course, after doing it for a while we’ll discover we’re on our way toward living our calling. But ‘little worrier’ didn’t figure out we were starting until it’s too late, as it was just a ‘dress rehearsal’.
2. We can view it as a learning exercise.
We haven’t got it all figured out, so we’re just going to start with a student mentality. Our little worrier will see that we’re not really setting out to change the world. We’re just learning by doing.
It’s a myth that most successful people laid out the perfect plan and followed it fruitfully the first time. Most people find that success showed up far from their original plans, but they only got there because they started.
We need go make a mess. Learn a lot. Go through our dress rehearsal several times. Make lost of adjustments. And then we’ll find success. But to do this, we’ve got to start.
