Finally Almost Ready
I love these humorous song lyrics (see song link at the end of this blog):
“She’s been preparing to be ready to start thinking about changing…
Her heart is tired of being the enemy in the war her mind has been waging…
She’s been weighing good and bad advice with the cons and pros…
And she’s finally almost ready, to go!”
Is there a situation in your life where you’ve been procrastinating, or resisting the actions you know you need to take? I like to change the phrase “Ready, aim, fire!” to “Ready, FIRE!, aim.” So often, we seem to get stuck in the “aim” part of the equation, afraid to commit to the perceived risk of action. One of the most important and powerful learnings on my own journey has been that there will be an opportunity to course-correct, once I have actually taken action, and that it’s the taking of action that engages me with life, and helps me build on lived experiences.
Of course, it’s generally wise to practice healthy discernment before choosing what action to take, but long deliberation is usually counterproductive because it tends to steer us away from our most authentic, intuitive inner knowings. Deliberation allows seeds of doubt and distrust to plant themselves, and these tend to be fast-growing weeds in the mind-garden. We’ve probably all had the experience of having an immediate gut-knowing about something, but then setting that aside while we explore all other possible options, only to wind up right back with our initial knowing (or, we take one of the other possible actions, and then realize we would have done better to respect the wisdom of our first hit).
My favorite part of the work I do as a natural health and wellness mentor is to help my clients rebuild a deeply trusting relationship with their own innate inner guidance systems. When this relationship is very weak and distrustful, humans are left to flail about in search of guidance from authorities outside of ourselves, and we tend to ultimately reject most of this outside advice because it doesn’t completely “fit.” Ever had this experience?
To be clear, information from the outer world is essential in our lives, and contributes to an experience of healthy inter-dependence. If we are having difficulty landing a clear decision about what action to take, it may indeed be because we have not gathered sufficient information yet. Often though, we have gathered plenty of information from outside of ourselves, and we are having difficulty sorting it due to a weak relationship with our inner guidance system. We don’t trust ourselves to know what to do with the information, or which information is “right” for our situation, for our particular needs. The external authorities can all sound so convincing, even though their ideas conflict with each other! What are we to do?
Isn’t it fascinating how much credence we give to these external authorities, and yet we cannot trust our own inner authority whom we have lived with and been getting to know for our whole lives! Let’s take the example of nutrition and diet. We look to the people who have made this their focus of study, and we expect them to have found the answers we seek. But then we realize that these experts have somehow all found different answers, and now we must have some way to decide for ourselves which information to use.
Staying with this example, after nearly 20 years of studying nutrition and diet, and sampling many different prescribed programs but never reaching my health goals, I finally stumbled upon the information that suddenly made it all feel clear to me. Why? Because this information was so simple and basic and truly nature-based, it connected immediately and completely with my own intuition. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it on my own (I had gotten lost in the weeds of all the different arguments about what humans are supposed to eat), but once it was pointed out to me, I knew instantly that I had found my pot-of-gold, and my true compass-setting.
There are times when I know I need to sit still with myself and hear my own answer so I can take decisive action. There are other times when I know I need to sit still with myself and make peace with the idea that this may be one of those times when it is wise to NOT act on the thing just yet - either because I really do need more time to allow information to flow into my awareness, or because I need to slow down and catch up with myself before adding more big actions. In other words, there are times for swift action, and times to allow for integration of previous actions.
How do you know if you may be avoiding an action, because you don’t want to face the ways in which you will be challenged to call on your strength and courage, and step into a higher version of yourself? Honestly, I think this is the most frequent reason for procrastination, or delaying a commitment to an action that we know deep-down we need to take.
Here are 3 primary reasons I can think of for delaying action:
We don’t know with confidence if it’s the right action for us to take.
We subconsciously know this action would really be to please someone other than ourselves, so we feel resistance.
We fear the consequences of taking the action - we fear what will be required of us.
Can you think of any others? I’d love to hear. This is such an important topic, because whether or not you can put action into motion in a timely way, for the things that matter most to you in life, will determine the quality of life that you experience. If you wish to live by design rather than by default, you will need to deepen your connection and trust in your own intuition and inner guidance system, and build that self-reliance muscle.
“And then the day came, when the pain it took to remain tight in the bud was greater than the pain it took to blossom.” - Anais Nin