My girlfriend DiAnna, who always has a way with words, posted this on her Facebook wall February 1st and I thought it was so funny I wanted to share.
HAPPY PROCRASTINATOR’S NEW YEAR!!!
It got me thinking about procrastination, mostly because I am so talented at it.
I realize that when I’m really worried about something that’s really difficult to do, it makes me take longer to get started. I stress about whether or not I’m going to be good at it, and then I end up having to rush to get it done, knowing that if I had more time, I’d be under so much less pressure. And it would have been much easier to do.
AND I would have had stress-free free-time, because I would have earned it and not felt guilty about it.
The latest Challenge I made comes to mind. It has awesome reviews so far, but man if I wasn’t terrified to make it.
I mean. Terrified.
But eventually I ended up doing it anyway, and am so glad I did, because even with the mistakes I made creating it, writing it, publishing it, marketing it, I still am so glad I got the first one under my belt so I can improve on the next one.
And I never would have that opportunity if I didn’t bite the bullet and do it anyway, fear and all.
Now just imagine if I’d made my first Challenge back in August, when your fellow Patron Lori suggested I first do one. Think of how far and wide I could have spread these challenges already since then, even if I’d made a bunch of mistakes in the process. But no, I was too scared to do one up until now.
Sometimes when we’re trying to lose weight or trying to incorporate lifestyle changes, (ETL comes to mind), we stress about this same exact thing.
We worry that it’s going to be too hard. We worry that we’re going to fail. We worry that we will backslide and end up right where we started. Or worse: that we’ll be worse off than when we started.
Might as well just never start right?
But this is all just brain chatter. It’s not real.
The truth is that the more we try, the more we keep going, the more we “start over” again, the better we get.
Just think of it like learning an instrument.
If you only put enough effort in a few times to realize that you weren’t really good at it, and then stopped playing altogether because you will “never get the hang of it,” well, that would be really silly wouldn’t it?
But, who would possibly expect someone to become a perfect violinist on the first few tries? Or even in the first or second year of practice?
So many things like this in life, that are hard, are WORTH the effort of going and going and going, failing, starting again, and working out what went wrong to get better.
Truly learning from our mistakes.
It’s not like, “Oh I tried ETL and the cravings were too intense, so I just gave up.”
That’s not how we get to being better at this style of eating.
We get better at it by eating the food, struggling to keep up, figuring out what works for us through trial and error and sheer persistence.
It all adds up. It’s all worth it. And the amount of times you fail will lessen and lessen over time as you learn more.
Just like a little baby learning to walk. If she gave up the first 100 times she tried, she’d never learn. But instinctively, she knows that she just has to keep trying, so she can walk like all the big people around her.
Not that I have any experience watching babies learn to walk or anything. ;)
