This is a flash of obvious I had myself recently. A friend of mine, Erin Bowe, wanted to start taking better care of herself. A few months back she set up a gym in her basement, but she hasn’t really used it at all. And so she was saying one day, “You know, it might seem like a silly thing, but for the last few mornings I’ve just been taking my cup of tea down there and just sitting on my yoga mat. And that’s really helping to motivate me.”
BAZINGA! as Sheldon Cooper so drolly puts it.
If the brilliance of this tactic is not immediately obvious to you — who knows, maybe your brain doesn’t have the same problem mine does — allow me to illuminate:
Everything is always created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
And a lot of the time, we figure we can just jump from the decision to the doing — but it doesn’t work like that.
Your brain will not allow you to act until you know what you’re doing.
But what I mean by that is not that you need to have experience or a solid procedure going in; all the brain want is a picture; a visualization of what you’re planning to do.
That’s why Erin, with a hazy idea of exercising for an hour a day, got nowhere. Not because she didn’t want to exercise, but because she missed the crucial step of planning how she would exercise.
Without an idea of what she was going to do, her brain stubbornly refused to cooperate. But on the other hand, there was never really a good time or opportunity to plan.
So sitting in the space was a very soft, non-OCD way of letting your mind unpack the various things she could do to exercise.
And I’ve found the same thing with my own projects. Even if the image of what I want to create isn’t clear, I have to sit with the file open in front of me and just sit there until the image crystallizes.
Make the space, make the time. Show up. The rest really will take care of itself.
[ssbp]
