Rhianna JonesAfter Easter, my youngest started a few days of nursery a week, meaning that I’m child free for the first time in years for a good few hours. Naturally, I planned out everything I wanted to do like improve my fitness, work on my business, declutter the house, decorate, visit some places the kids wouldn’t be interested in and take some time to relax. Just a few things…
Of course, I’ve found it much harder to actually do things than I expected. It’s so easy to pick whatever is easiest on the last, or think I’ll do the thing after I tidy the house or even get distracted scrolling for longer than you planned. As perfectionists, a lot of us suffer with wanting to do things perfectly which often means, it never gets started at all. But the truth is that no amount of reading, prepping or trying to make everything else perfect first will help us to achieve our goals – only action will.
The perfect conditions don’t exist. Trying to create the perfect routine, the perfect conditions or the perfect moment means we delay what we really want to do. If you’re anything like me, I’ll read for hours, watch Youtube videos to inspire me but in the end this just creates the illusion of progress and then we look down, we’ve not actually done anything and got stuck in planning mode.
So I’m inviting you to join me in taking messy action. As I write this blog post, I’m working at the kitchen table and I’ve pushed some things over onto the sideboard next to me. I gave myself 3 minutes to clean and wipe the table then just lit a candle to give my brain the illusion of a lovely workspace – instead of giving into the temptation to do a full deep kitchen clean and suddenly realising it’s pick-up time.
My aim for the next few weeks is to allow myself a set amount of time to do tasks in order to allow myself to take messy action. For example, drop the kids off, go to the gym for 1 hour, set a timer for a power hour to clean the house, then stop and work on my business. This will help with the way my brain works but also means I’m actually starting to work on my goals.
We need to start before we feel ready. Take the tiniest imperfect action because that’s still an action – that’s what leads to real transformation.
