What if I need to get moving right away? Are there some tips that work? Read on!
"Without haste, and without delay"
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I suffered for most of my life from action blocks and procrastination. In those days, it was: Give me a task to do, and I'll sit on it and feel bad about it for months. Anything to do with writing or making phone calls was the worst. In my 40s, when I was the President of the Board of a national nonprofit, my task was to call up well-known people and invite them to speak at our annual event. It took me months to get in the right "mood" for that! (And by that time, most of them had other plans.)
Life feels so much better now that I act smoothly and promptly. By "smoothly" I mean that I'm neither resisting nor forcing myself.
When something in us is anxious and pushing, another part of us slows down in resistance. That leads to more scared impatience… to more resisting… and that's a recipe for stuckness.
In these newsletters I've talked about being Self-in-Presence, and saying Hello to both sides of the block, and sensing into what each side is "not wanting" and "wanting." This is the way to do deep work that brings the kind of transformation I have experienced: from almost everything not getting done, to almost everything getting done.
(And along the way, I released and discovered great treasure troves of my full self, and healed many old wounded places.)
But today I'd like to tell you about two little tips that help get things moving on a daily basis. One is something H. G. Wells said. He was a prolific writer best known for writing some of the earliest science fiction, like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. His motto was: "Work without haste, and without delay."
For me that captures the quality with which I want to act: not pushing, not resisting. In Presence.
"This much I can do"
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The other tip for moving into action even when the whole task feels impossible is to say: "This much I can do."
This helpful sentence reminds me to notice that some part of me had perhaps been daunted by the size of the task, or about some difficult aspect of it. Something in me feels I can't do it… but this much I can do.
You don't eat a whole dinner at one gulp, but bite by bite. That's how you can do a big task, too. It doesn't work for every kind of task, but it's surprising how often there is something do-able.
I've also been helped greatly by my productivity guru, David Allen, the author of the excellent Getting Things Done. He suggests asking, "What's the next action?" Often, we have been seeing a task as monolithic (organize all the papers) without asking ourselves, "What's the next action?" (buy file folders). Step by step…
For me there has been an interaction between learning productivity tips and doing Focusing on the emotional issues underlying blocks. I've needed both. I use the productivity tips until I come to something that won't budge that way. Then I pull out the Focusing.