Writing about the creative life and the stories all around us
listen here:
I have something to say
so large
so dangerous
it might destroy the world
I swallow it
lava turned granite
elbows my heart aside
crushes my lungs out of existence
graceless under pressure
walk, don’t talk
hold on tight
I’m unexploded
barbs in my throat
(smile)
each breath a haze of pain
acid rains unwept
corroded within
a shiny carapace
I swallow it
my gut twists
in broken glass waves
tiptoeing
careful now
when the bomb blows
only one victim
No matter how hard you push yourself, there comes a time when you hit a wall. Either you’ve lost interest and excitement in your project, or you’re just exhausted by the work.
Empathy and good humour are in short supply. You zone out, even during your leisure time. You’ve been running too hard for too long, and now your tank is empty and you’re running on fumes.
You simply don’t care anymore. Welcome to burnout.
We’ve all seen it in others. The dead eyes of the caring professional, the weary voice of the call centre operative, or the resigned indifference of a mother with young children all have the same flat emotional tone. It’s as though such people are hollow, all their colours washed out. They have no spark.
You put the way you feel down to stress or fatigue. While these obviously play a part, burnout goes deeper than that.
When you’re burnt out every day is just more of the same.
Your life is like Groundhog Day, endlessly repeating except that unlike Bill Murray’s character, there’s no way to escape the loop. Low intellectual challenge combined with high physical or emotional challenge is a recipe for discontent.
Physical challenge can come in the form of long hours, hard manual labour, or lack of rest. Emotional challenge is dealing with other people’s emotions, absorbing rudeness or abuse, and repressing your natural responses. In the case of sectors such as retail and hospitality, the requirement to do all this while smiling is an added layer of stress.
Maybe it’s the extra self-imposed load of writing or a side hustle that’s drained your tanks. You can barely muster a smile. Nothing you do makes a difference and you can’t bear another day. All your emotions are blunted except anger, ranging from mild irritation to full blown fury. Everyone frustrates you, which is anger in another guise.
Emotional energy is like money. Each day we have a finite amount to spend. If you’re a millionaire, you can afford to give to anyone who asks. But when you’re down to your last pound, even a request for 50 pence is too much. You just don’t have it, and you lash out at the tiniest demand.
How can you be creative in this situation?
We are all creative, but for some of us it’s a defining pursuit. A burnt out bricklayer can still build a wall, even if quality suffers. A burnt out creative loses inspiration and motivation. Their output dwindles and dries up, and the impact on their livelihood is matched only by that on their psyche as they start to question their identity.
It turns out you can’t make something from nothing.
Many occupations and professions have a culture of long hours. Smartphones in every pocket are a modern marvel that chains us to email and therefore work. And that’s before we consider social media and the stress of a hyperconnected world.
If you recognise yourself here, maybe it’s time to take a breath.
Once you’ve determined that burnout is your problem, it’s time to fix it. The term “work” means the totality of your non-leisure activities, paid and unpaid.
Try some or all of the following.
Take a moment in a busy day. Close your eyes, blow out all the air in your lungs. Let your stomach sag and relax. Take a short breath in and blow it out slowly, repeat five times. Rest your eyes by looking at something distant. If that’s not possible, find a picture of mountains or a lake online and examine that. Breathe.
Repeat twice daily and whenever overwhelm and anxiety start to build.
Every body needs adequate rest and quality sleep is the foundation of wellness.
In a world of 5am starts and late nights, most of us are sleeping less than ever. Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, wrote The Sleep Revolution to highlight the importance of sleep to our overall health and success. She has six rules for better sleep.
If you’re getting only five to six hours of sleep, and especially if that sleep is poor quality, you probably need more. Watch your programme on catch-up and go to bed earlier.
You’re probably leaning on something to keep you going, whether caffeine, sugar, or alcohol. Go cold turkey and stop. You may be able to restart at a lower level after seven to ten days, or you might feel so much better that you carry on without.
Cutting out caffeine can cause a withdrawal headache for a few days, so drink lots of water to help minimise it.
Eating sugary or starchy foods leads to a yo-yo effect, where blood sugars rise and fall rapidly. This can impact your mood and irritability. Eating a large carbohydrate meal can cause sluggishness soon afterwards. Try splitting your lunch and having some as a snack mid-afternoon. Have more salad and fruits and less bread, cereals, and pasta.
Alcohol has a potent depressant effect. It might help you go to sleep but it disturbs your sleep and is dehydrating overall. If you choose to drink, have no more than two units of alcohol per night and at least two alcohol-free days each week.
After a day hunched over a keyboard or picking up and holding small children, you collapse on the couch, phone or remote in hand. It’s no wonder you’re aching. Muscles become weak, tight, and imbalanced due to sedentary lifestyles.
While we all know exercise is good for us, the road to burnout almost always includes ditching healthy habits. When the gym or your usual sport seems too daunting, a short walk is a perfect alternative. A ten-minute walk each day has real benefits for health and mental wellbeing.
As you feel better, incorporate regular exercise into your routine. Schedule it in your diary. Some like to work out their adrenaline in spin classes or kick-boxing, but you might benefit more from walking, running, swimming, or even yoga.
If you drove your car the way you drive yourself, you wouldn’t be surprised when it broke down.
Have you taken leave in the last six months? Have you set time limits on working at home, or doing overtime? Often we’re convinced that we have to do extra, but pushing until you crash helps nobody.
Spend time looking at the way you work. Can you delegate or give up something? Your boss may not be sympathetic to your issues, but if you can present a solution and not just a problem your chance of successful change improves.
Batch your work so you can concentrate on one thing at a time. Remove distractions such as social media. Consider noise-cancelling headphones, or listen to a noise generator like the ones at mynoise.net to drown out busy thoughts or external environments.
Do what you can to improve your ability to do deep work, as burnout reduces your effectiveness.
At home, teach your children to clean their rooms and do their own laundry. Buy in help if you can afford it. Share rides for sports and training sessions with other parents. Reduce social obligations that drain you.
A life without play and enjoyment is first dull and eventually unbearable. Spend some time outside. Time in nature refreshes and brings perspective, whether it’s in a park or on a mountaintop. If you live near the sea, make the effort to visit because watching the waves reduces distress and promotes calm.
Pick up your favourite hobby or a good book. Listen to uplifting music while you exercise as this has a proven effect on mood.
Having something to look forward to helps you get through the days. Book a concert, see a movie or visit a gallery, plan to do something fun at the weekend. Without play you grow old before your time, and without new experiences you ossify and become boring. You don’t want that.
Why are you doing what you do?
Part of burn-out is a feeling of hopelessness, that it’s all for nothing. One small thing that helps is a visual reminder. I kept a cute photo of my kids on my desk to remind me what I was working for. Other options include a place you love, a happy family group, the house you want to buy, or even tickets to a concert.
The image triggers positive memories and emotions to combat the tide of negativity. It helps you go on, just a little more.
In the same vein, crossing off the days to an event can help. Maybe it’s a vacation you’re looking forward to, maybe it’s the day you leave – either way, you want to create a sense of anticipation and excitement.
Following on from the point above, what if you’re doing the wrong thing? Or doing the right thing, but the wrong way?
You can use your trusty journal to free-write about everything that’s weighing you down. Often – if not always – you know the answers, deep down. You know you need to make a change, and you resist it for apparently rational reasons.
Perfectionists deal with their doubts about work by doubling down. They assume their dissatisfaction is the result of not working hard enough, and they are at high risk of burnout. The professions are the natural home of high-achieving perfectionists using dysfunctional coping mechanisms to deal with the truth; their role, responsibilities or work ethos is a bad fit for them.
But if your identity is tied to being a doctor, or lawyer, or entrepreneur, change will be painful and affect other people too. That keeps you stuck, no matter the cost, but consider this.
Burnout is a message – the price of your current life is your peace of mind, and that cost is too high.
So you need to figure out what and how to change, with help if need be. Change can range from working smarter, changing roles, starting something on the side that nourishes you, all the way to leaving your job and starting again.
Remember that you choose to do what you do.
When you say you have to do a thing, you also choose to reject the alternatives. You could resign today and go live in a cabin in the woods. There are many good reasons why that won’t work, but they don’t make the option disappear. And it will be the right option for someone.
Your job is to get rested and then get clarity on the things that matter. Own your choices. Then decide how to fit them into a life that works for you.
There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.
Alan Cohen
Sometimes our lives get unbalanced. Burnout is an extreme case, where multiple aspects are neglected for a long time in favour of work. It is not necessary to destroy your relationships and your health in pursuit of some work ideal. If you’re crying in your car and unable to go into the building, or drinking every night to find rest, the warning lights are flashing.
Start to take better care of yourself so you can attend to the work of change. You may think you’re chained to your life as it is, but often you also hold the keys to your own freedom.
Renewal after burnout is possible if you allow yourself the space to find it.
(first published by Publishous on Medium 24.7.19)
Have a comment? Drop it below.
You can’t always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.
Wayne Dyer
We all want to succeed. When success doesn’t come, we tell ourselves stories about why that might be.
Most of these excuses are false. And you know it. Humans are really good at rationalising their failures and placing the blame elsewhere.
Be honest.
Whether you bottle it up or act it out, are you keeping yourself from the things you say you want?
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
Dale Carnegie
There’s something you want, but you doubt your ability to get it. Deep down, you don’t think you deserve it. Seeing someone else with what you want makes you envious, so you become hypercritical of yourself or that person, which both lead to bitterness and anger.
Criticism and envy are signposts to what you really want. Figure out precisely what that is, and you’re well on the way to getting it.
Success looks very different to each of us. If you envy the writer with a number one bestseller, what element of their success annoys you most? It could be critical acclaim, financial security, freedom to write all day rather than be employed, or even the fact that they look so damn happy in their photos. Why can’t you have that?
Use that feeling. You can have what they have if you master your self-doubt.
A certain amount of doubt is healthy but too much is paralysing. Start with your definition of success and make a plan to get there. Don’t let doubt stop you. It’s time to act.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Shannon L. Alder
Do you order the same food from the same restaurant every time?
Do you try that new restaurant you drove past yesterday, or do you only visit places that others have given at least a 4.8 review rating?
Risk aversion keeps you locked in place ruminating over all the ways things can go wrong if you change. You follow the herd, even if the herd isn’t going your way.
Moving towards your dreams always entails risk. It might be more difficult than you thought. You might not make it. It might not look as good from the inside.
But what’s the alternative?
The only way you’ll know where your limits are is to push yourself further. You can’t reach a new level without taking a chance that you might fail. Don’t discount the possibility that you might succeed.
Focus on the chance of success and accept that you’ll probably have to try more than once. Failing forward is tough, but taking each failure as a lesson helps you build the resilience and feedback you need.
As Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Adjust your aim and keep swinging.
We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
It’s often said that change is the only constant in life. We can only navigate a hugely complex world by filtering, simplifying and making mental models.Even though we’re hard-wired to prefer novelty, we also resist change because of the strain it puts on our mental bandwidth. Add to that fear of the unknown, and we retreat into the familiar safety of the comfort zone.
Resisting change eats away at you because repressing emotion consumes more energy than expressing it. Imagine you’re punching something. Now imagine you pull that punch at the last minute. You use energy for forward motion and more energy for an equal reverse motion. Not only that, but denying the punch leads to anger and resentment because you don’t get the release you need.
All that energy expended, yet you’re stuck in the same rut, settling for less. It’s exhausting.
You know you need a change when you’re bored repeating the same routine, when you’ve stopped learning, when there’s less and less reward in your activities.
You also know when a situation is bad for you and you need to change it or leave.
When you’ve poured a great deal of time and energy into a job or relationship, change can feel like a waste of your investment. This sunk cost fallacy stops you from cutting your losses and leads to inertia, staying with something that has no hope of improvement. What is right for one time and place may not be right forever.
Face that growing feeling of discontent head on. Use your journal to uncover its source or talk it out with someone. Identifying the source is the first step to deciding what changes you need to make, and they may not be as extensive as you fear.
Unresolved conflict between what you have and what you want often transforms into anger that is directed towards the self in anxiety and low mood, or outwards into hostility and envy.
Find the courage to confront the possibility of change so that you control the process.
We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.
Jim Rohn
I expect you’re a busy person, like everyone these days. But are you doing the things that matter even if they’re difficult, or giving in to distraction?
If you find yourself down a rabbit hole of Youtube videos after looking up a simple fact online, you’re not alone. But the resulting guilt and shame can be enough to derail you from your actual work. Procrastination can wear many faces, including filling your time with “worthy” activities like reading or research or reorganising the kitchen cupboards.
It’s not enough to be busy. You need to be productive, not merely occupied. Getting clear on the day’s priorities is the first step, and an ordered schedule will help you achieve that. Each Sunday, spend thirty minutes with your planner and set aside time in the coming week for must-do and want-to-do tasks.
Knowing what to do and when gets around having fifty things you could be doing bouncing around your head, but being unable to pick one and therefore doing none of them.
Like eating your broccoli before dessert, must-do items come first. If you’re a rewards person, finish the task before you have your cookie, ten minutes of social media or whatever.
If you’re prone to distraction, minimise it. Use one of many stripped down desktop apps so you focus. Leave your phone in another room. Research has shown that even if it is silenced, your smartphone still pulls your attention.
Can’t bear to get started? Does the task feel overwhelming? Use the Pomodoro technique to break it into ten or fifteen-minute chunks. If a task fills you with dread, get it out of the way and eat the frog first. Everything else will be easier by comparison.
Get on task, stay on task, and accomplish more with your time.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
Abraham Maslow
You probably know someone who likes to consider their options carefully. They gather information, take opinions, and always think twice. They feel safer when they have more evidence.
Then there are people who make choices based on their feelings about them, good or bad. Often they are highly intuitive. Journaling becomes a sacred rite as they dig deeper and deeper into emotions.
Too much analysis leads to paralysis. Too much thinking about feelings is another route to procrastination. Faced with an overload of emotion, you might manage it by repression, distraction, or numbing. In any case, you get nothing done.
Deep thinking is a good thing — as long as it leads to action. At some point, you have to declare the thinking phase complete, draw up a shortlist of options, and then choose one.
A list of pros and cons is the simplest tool, and the act of writing them down clarifies your thoughts.
A simple scoring system can help you prioritise different options. For example, when buying a house, I had a list of essentials like location, number of bedrooms, and living space. The second list was for desirables like south facing and size of the garden. By allocating one to three points for each essential and one point for each desirable, I was able to compare houses with different features more easily.
If a house missed any essentials it was out of the running, no matter how lovely. Scoring helps to take some of the emotion from the equation, especially for big decisions. Making your lists forces you to be more objective, but there’s nothing to stop you allocating your points in any way that feels right.
If you’re considering a major decision like a job change or relocation, try visualisation. Imagine yourself in a future where you’ve stayed unchanged and not followed through. Do you feel regret or disappointment? That’s a clue that this change could be right for you.
Of course, you can’t see the future, but you can use a combination of techniques to make the best decision you can. Emotion allied to objectivity gives you the best of both worlds.
Self-sabotage is when we say we want something and then go about making sure it doesn’t happen.
Alyce Cornyn-Selby
Your inner roadblocks are expressed in different behaviours.
You might recognise yourself in any or all of the scenarios above. We’re only human and none of us is perfect, but naming the obstacle is the first step to overcoming it. Outer behaviours always reflect inner thinking, so mastering your internal dialogue will improve your chances of success.
(first published by Publishous on 17.7.19)
Have a comment or suggestion? Drop it below.
If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
Do you have a zombie work?
It’s the one piece you can’t get right, a short story or blog post or novel that haunts your hard drive.
You’re stuck because you can’t figure out the right style of the gowns in your Imperial court, or your research on spring weather patterns in Kansas has led down increasingly arcane corridors.
You’ll publish or submit, someday. But it’s not perfect yet, so the world never sees it.
Perfectionists often procrastinate. You believe if a thing’s worth doing, it must be done properly and nothing less will do. So you either rework and edit endlessly, or you don’t even start because you can never get it absolutely right. And you can’t edit an empty page.
You conceal these feelings behind strong psychological defences and sublimate them into pointless activity. But research isn’t writing. At some level, you know that and you’re disappointed with yourself.
At the heart of perfectionism is fear.
Fear of failure.
Fear of success, because then you have to do it again, leading back to fear of failure.
To overcome perfectionism, you need to understand your fear and master it. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is action despite feeling fear.
Courage is taking a deep breath and doing it anyway because your desire for something is greater than the fear of what might happen.
If you never challenge yourself to move past fear, you cannot improve or grow. In order to step out there and thrive, you’ll need to let some ideas go and embrace new thinking.
Fear is a basic emotion that we all understand. You fear humiliation and ridicule for getting something wrong. Perhaps you replay some old memory of being laughed at for a minor error, and that underlies your current avoidant behaviour.
There are two reasons why you should leave that in the past where it belongs.
Babies are the world’s fastest learners. From zero, they learn to feed, walk, talk, and live in a social unit, all within two years. They achieve this not by being perfect, but the opposite. They stumble, fall, stand up again.
They babble nonsense and parrot speech without understanding at first. Eventually, they achieve a level of competence that allows them to run, jump, and sing a nursery rhyme.
They don’t beat themselves up because they can’t yet recite Shakespeare. They simply chatter and listen to adults when corrected. Each time they repeat, they’re closer to the goal of intelligible speech.
You learned to speak, walk, and countless other complex skills in the same way. If you had waited to speak until you were perfect, you wouldn’t have uttered a word for years.
Cultivate a beginner’s mind. Understand that supposed errors are signposts back to the right path, and you’re much less fearful of your results. Judge not against some unattainable level of perfection, but against where you were last time you tried.
You already know how to learn and improve. Adjust your aim, and try again.
Oh, you say, but you prefer quality over quantity. People repeat this justification for low output as if it were gospel truth. It’s completely wrong.
In an experiment, students in a ceramics class were split into two groups. One group was told that they could get an A by turning in one perfect piece. The other group was told that they would be graded solely on the total weight of pieces produced, of any quality.
The results were surprising.
The second group produced a large number of extremely good pieces. They were liberated from the pursuit of perfection and given free rein to experiment without being penalised. I’d bet money they were happier with their work too.
Repeated practice increased their skills and confidence. They weren’t paralysed by over-analysis or worried about criticism. They did not fear the impossibility of lightning striking twice, because they knew how to create a storm. They were able to replicate good work because they understood what went into making it.
The more you make, the better you get. Quantity leads to quality.
How much poorer we would be if Dali had refused to let anyone see his paintings, or if Michelangelo had obsessively chipped away at and repolished his David. Remember also that an artist’s most famous works comprise only a fraction of their total output.
Writers learn more from finishing one story than from starting and abandoning ten. You’ll learn where you wrote yourself into a corner, and how to figure your way out. You’ll learn how many plots you can juggle. You’ll learn what makes a good ending. And eventually, you’ll join up all those skills and move from conscious competence to unconscious competence.
In other words, you will master your craft and spend more effort on deciding where to put the ball than how to kick it.
At some point, you have to declare a thing finished and stop editing. The more refined your skill, the harder it is. You always feel there is just one more thing you could improve.
Let it go. Ship it. Publish, submit, and move on to the next thing.
That’s the secret; always have a next thing. Each piece becomes a little less precious when it forms a smaller part of your portfolio. You may still have your favourites and the ones you shrug over, but the whole collection is what matters.
Confidence comes from improvement. You know you can make another piece, and it might be even better than the last. And if it’s not, that’s okay too.
That is true creative freedom.
listen to this poem here:
There is a place where the sky is
amazingly, truly blue
always perfect summer
floral silk flutters in a warm breeze.
Tea and cake on elegant lawns. We watch
the world go by.
And in this place
the string quartet plays on
all worries fade to leave us
contented, soft.
We float on half-heard conversations
skirt around the deep
drown in the shallows while our hearts
barely beat.
More cake? Yes please
this sponge is rather good.
And no amount of genteel words can fill
the gaps and missing parts
but yes, a fine day, a fine day indeed, yes
I heard, it’s such wonderful news.
Lips moving, tasting, swallowing
a full portion
of nothing at all.
I want to be a cat in my next life. Cats are great role models. A well-loved pet would be ideal, but since I’m a cat that’s not essential.
I can rely on sharp claws and keen senses to feed and defend myself. I carry myself with supple grace, accept affection on my own terms, and find the warmest spot in the house to sleep. Sounds pretty good.
But in this life I set goals and strive to exceed them. Sometimes that works. Today I’m tired and a little disheartened, because the reward for my efforts is unpredictable and I can’t figure out what’s worth repeating.
You’ve probably had days like that too. Days when endless hustle and failing forward feel like hitting your head against a brick wall, over and over. Days when it’s hard to believe in yourself and stay motivated.
Can you rediscover your appetite for the hunt? Can you be more like a cat?
Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts. — William Bruce Cameron
Comparison might be the thief of joy, but we still have to track our stats. How else will we know where we stand?
Looking at numbers drives you to a kind of madness. Whether you count views, followers, pounds lost or lifted, or revenue, numbers draw you in. The world shrinks to a set of digits that you then equate to your own value.
If they’re going the wrong way, heaven help you and the people around you.
Peak madness is achieved by then comparing those numbers to other people’s numbers. You inevitably come up short because you only look at the most successful — those who you hope to emulate someday.
But you want someday to be today. You want the bragging rights, the book deal, and the interview on a popular TV show — now. Hasn’t it been long enough? Probably not. It takes much longer than you think or want to build success.
Remember when you longed for just one fan or even ten reads? Other writers are still there, hardly out of the starting gate. You’ve moved past that, and as long as you keep creating you’ll move past your next milestone too. Perhaps there are other measures of your impact.
Views and reads matter to writers, but they don’t map exactly to engagement. Look at comments, however brief. Out of your whole audience, those who comment are the most engaged fans. They take time to read, vote, and then reach out to you.
Treasure your commenters. Reply and thank them for their time and interest. Make a connection. I won’t pretend claps don’t matter, especially if money is involved. But when you’re still some way from your next milestone, the smallest dopamine hit of approval is welcome.
A flower blossoms for its own joy. — Oscar Wilde
There’s deep satisfaction in doing something well. Craftsmen of old spent time making sure the back of an object, though not usually seen, was still beautiful. You can turn a finely tailored jacket inside out and find no loose stitches or raw seams. Every part of a created object reflects the skill and attention of its creator.
Writing can be art, but it must always be craft. Your writing should be the best you can produce. Live by the Beyoncé principle: over-promise, over-deliver, and keep on growing. Standards vary from day to day, but should never be less than good. Make it good, then make it better.
How do you know it’s better? On your down days, take your latest finished piece and compare it to your work of six or twelve months ago. Look at those older pieces and see how they could be tightened and polished further.
The same applies to losing weight, getting fitter, or learning a skill. Look back at where you started, review your SMART goals, and progress becomes clearer.
There’s a long way to go yet, but you’re on your way so give yourself credit for the journey so far. Take a reward for effort, and keep going.
You want to be known for consistent high quality. Henry Ford said quality means doing it right when no-one is watching. One day, those eyes will be turned on you. Be ready.
A few years ago I bought a car from a doctor at the start of his career. He was selling the car to help fund his planned attempt on Everest.
Wait a minute. Mount Everest? He wanted to be an Army surgeon. He also wanted to climb Everest before he was thirty. Both goals required a ton of hard work, so he made a plan that matched his impressive ambitions.
Now imagine someone builds an elevator that goes to Everest’s peak. Almost anyone can book a ride and stand at the top. How impressive is that? Not very.
The fact is, we value what we pay for. And the reverse is also true; we don’t value what we get for free.
How does that connect with writing or whatever business you’re in? It means the hard work you do is integral to the payoff you get. The harder you work, the sweeter the reward.
Now you can reframe the work as building a bigger payoff. Giving your work both intrinsic and future worth carries you through the inevitable gloomy days when the wind dies in your sails.
Don’t drift in the doldrums when that happens. What you do when you’re losing is the measure of your character. Get out the oars and start rowing.
But this time you can’t row. You’re caught in a perfect storm; work, health, relationship or financial issues make it impossible to do more. You’re barely surviving as it is. What to do now?
Maybe you can’t lean in, but you can limit backsliding. Three things will help you.
Sometimes you can fake it till you make it; other times you can’t. When the fears of not good enough and you’re going to fail take hold, you’ll struggle. Struggle is an inescapable part of life, of daring to hope for better. Hold fast to dreams, but know that they aren’t enough to get you where you want to be.
‘The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.’ — Robert Downey Jr
A cat doesn’t make a jump by staring at its feet all day. It focuses on the landing. If it falls short, it digs in its claws and scrambles up. Then it sits and licks a paw as if it exerted no effort at all to reach the target.
Keep moving, whatever you have to do, however tiny the progress. Look back only to remind yourself how far you’ve come already, then turn your eyes forward to the peak. It’s always uphill to the top.
(first published 30.7.19 in Mind Café on Medium )
Have a comment? Drop it below.
