get started

How often have we heard that in life? Whether it’s our new business or a new phase in our established business, or perhaps an unexpected season in our personal life like stepping up post-cancer or tackling a difficult hill like empty nesting. Perhaps it’s a new job or something smaller like getting fit or giving up smoking. Whatever the journey, as humans and particularly as business owners, we’re always starting…..something.

And it isn’t easy. Why is that? Well, here are three good reasons I can think of in my long career as a psychologist and business coach to SME owners:

We start in the wrong place.

The place we always choose to start anything is here and now, but that’s not the best place. Yip, you heard right😅. Well then, where is? And the answer is at the end. If we can go out into our futures and clearly visualise, describe and narrate a picture of what, whatever journey we want to go on will look like on our arrival at its destination, we increase our chances of getting there exponentially. We also prime our brain – which is essentially a muscle – on how to think best on any problems in the way, how to solve these and find a way to get from where we are now to said destination. And as an added plus, we unleash what Michael Lothier calls the Law of Attraction which says that we’ll increase the chances of seeing, encountering, coming across, and attracting “help” from others, our environment, chance and luck to get us there. So why not?

We don’t appreciate that to start anything, we first have to stop something else.

If we want to get into a jogging habit, first we have to break the habit of sitting on the couch and NOT jogging, then we have to build the habit of going for a jog. Darren Hardy calls this “The Compound Effect”. And in his book by the same title (a brilliant, quick read on this subject), he explains why building new habits is simply said and far from easily done. He expands on why missing out a few days can impact our good intentions and direction so easily and deals with why we “fall off the bandwagon”. And the answer is quite simply that we don’t appreciate the double whammy of stopping something before we can start something else. We have to get good and committed to both.

We forget how much WHY matters.

Nietzsche famously said that “we who have a why can bear any how”. And he’s right, humans will do the impossible if they have a good enough reason to. So, in relation to the change you want to effect in yourself – that thing you need to just start – give yourself one! If it’s real and means something to you, you’ll chase it.

And if this blog inspired you, why not take a look at my other musings?