Why You Must Simply Begin

You spend hours mulling over ideas in your head. You lie in bed at night, electrified with excitement for tomorrow, when you’ll make your plans real. You weigh the pros and cons of starting one project over another, uncertain about which passion needs your attention right now.

You delay the actual starting. You wrestle with decisions some more. You wonder if, perhaps, you should scrap all the ideas, move forward with none of them. You erroneously think you’re just indecisive—or worse—“lazy.”

You’re not lazy. And you’re not indecisive. In your heart of hearts, you know what you want and how to do it. If only social conditioning and that enormous wheelbarrow of fear would step aside, you could move forward with things. You could bring your ideas to fruition. You could make an impact on the world by sharing all your crazy ideas.

The first step is always meeting the fear as kindly as you can.

To allow your wisest self to see the light of day, you need to engage with your fear. That’s the first step. Otherwise, even if you make progress, it will all be harder, because the fear will accompany you through each step, weighing you down like an enormous backpack full of bricks.

What are your fears about your various plans? Identify them, allow them to be there (all fear is legitimate, no matter how nonsensical it may seem), and see what you need to do to allay or disprove those fears. You can start by asking yourself these questions:

• Do you have proof from past experiences that your fears are unfounded?
• Could it be that a positive outcome from taking an action is just as likely as the negative one you’re imagining when you feel the fear?
• Can you simply allow the fear to be there and, now that you’re aware of it and its effect on you, move through the motions lightened by that knowledge?

The first step is always meeting the fear as kindly as you can.

The next step is to begin.

It does not matter what you begin. It matters only that you begin at all.

If you’re afraid of picking the wrong project, I hear you. I am, too. I also know that whichever step you choose to take will be the right one. Do what feels most interesting to you right now, and that course of action will be right. For you. Right now.

If the project isn’t feeling good after you’ve begun, you can always quit. As Emilie has written before, you don’t have to finish anything if you don’t want to. (She’s right about that.)

All roads lead to Rome.

Whether or not you keep going with the project you choose to tackle first, it will lead you exactly where you need to go eventually. Beginning to research your novel could lead you into the world of startups, and you could realize that you really, really need to create a company. When that happens, you can do that. But the only way you’re going to get there is by starting that novel which will lead you down the startup path.

Starting to write a song could teach you that you actually don’t enjoy writing music. That, now, is information you can use to go and find the thing (or things) you will enjoy doing right now. But if you hadn’t started to write the song you dreamed of, you would never have known that it wasn’t for you. You had to try songwriting to experience how not-quite-right it felt. You need to test drive one car to learn it isn’t suited to your current lifestyle, so that you can move on to test driving another.

I know it’s scary to start something. There’s no way for you to know what it will be like to actually do the new thing, or how it will feel to be on the other side of it. I also know that a rich land of untapped zest lies just on the other side of that fear.

You will get there.

Like Rome, all roads lead there. You need only start down the path in front of you.

Your Turn

What project could you begin, right now, to launch yourself down the path?

Kylie Bellard is an empowerment coach and photographer who teaches people how to like themselves so they can bring all their wonderfulness to the world. You can find her on Twitter as @kyliewriteshere, or read more of her words at Effervescence.me.