I’m on a new path. Or maybe I’m back on my original path. Actually, I think I just found the right path to my original destination. In any case I feel like I’m back on track. I’ll make a more formal announcement, declaration, or whatever you want to call it later. For now I just had some observations I wanted to make.
I’ve learned over the years that the world is made up of different personalities. One way to measure these personalities is to look at how they approach a task. You can think of a task as shooting a target. Shooting a target is basically three steps. 1. Ready – define the target; make sure you are in position; make sure your weapon is loaded etc. 2. Aim – point in the right direction; make sure your sights are on the target; make sure you have good technique (breath in let out half, squeeze the trigger etc.) and finally 3. Fire – execute the strategy; jump in and do it!
Now a normal well balanced person, when faced with a task, will do those steps in order. Ready. Aim. Fire. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a truly normal, well balanced person though. In reality there are folks out there who are super driven and tend to do it this way: FIRE! Oh, yeah, aim….and uhhhhhh…what was the other one? Then there’s the careful folks: Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim…… then there’s the procrastinators: Ready. Ready. Ready. Aim. Ready……. I tend to be sort of a careful procrastinator: Ready. Aim. Ready. Aim….and eventually I fire…sometimes.
As I said, I’m sort of redesigning my path these days. So I’ve been spending time learning stuff to get me back to where I want to be (READY). Some of this learning is through workshops. I noticed recently during a workshop that I was finding all sorts of valuable information. Which you would hope is the case when you pay for a workshop. The interesting thing is that some of the value came in the form of information I already knew or knew better than the instructor. I’m not trying to brag about how much I know. What I’m saying is it made me realize that I’m falling into my personality quirk of getting stuck in the READY phase. I think a lot of folks do this. They don’t think they’re ready to make the leap so they keep preparing (READY). When in fact most of us already have the information we need. We just need to be confident enough to pull the trigger.
Now, I tend to lean more towards the procrastinator side. Which means aiming can be scary to me because that puts me one step closer to actually firing. So my next step is to kick myself in the butt and aim (set some goals and pick some targets). And realize that I can work on getting ready, while I aim, and even while I pull the trigger on other targets. Yikes! I think my heart rate literally increased by about 10 beats!
Wish me luck!