The Power of Starting Small - Dealing with Overwhelm and Procrastination

Resistance

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” – The War of Art

It's hard to start a project. It's hard to take that first step, especially when it seems like you have no idea where to begin. It's overwhelming, and you start to put it off, telling yourself that you'll get to it later. But then later becomes a lot later, and soon you've got a backlog of projects that never seem to get done.

Procrastination is one of the most common problems we have to deal with as Business Owners and Leaders and reminds of me an extract from The War of Art - “Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves, "I'm never going to write my symphony." Instead we say, "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow."

Recently I attended a networking event which had a keynote talk, the keynote talk was around writing a book to build your authority. After the talk had finished one of the attendees asked “Where do I start?”

The attendee had explained that he was very, very shy, that he didn't put himself out there, so wasn't confident in the approach. The presenter immediately went into overdrive, spuing out “start with your framework, do this, do that, then write your pages, then do...”, you could see this wave of overwhelm come over the individual.

It’s at this point I interjected and spoke about the power of starting small, “if it was me, I’d start small, start one page at a time, even one paragraph at a time. Do something that enables you to take a small step in getting over the overwhelm and procrastination. Pick something that you’re comfortable doing and start small."

It's always been my approach to slowly lead into a task, a small incremental step in completing the problem, and then once I'm motion I'll stay in motion, generally until my task is finished.

After the meeting, the individual sent me a connection request and we had a conversation around the power of starting small, just breaking it down. The presenter may have started on the framework to start his creative process, but somebody else may not feel comfortable with that, they might be more comfortable in building out the stories, breaking it down into paragraphs, or fifty words, one hundred words per day.

Say to yourself, right I'm going to do this, I'm going to write fifty Words towards my book, and plan the time in your diary, no distraction, no notifications going off. What you'll find is that you'll start off with fifty words a day, but you'll actually finish a page and it'll just keep rolling and keep moving, ever-increasing because you become more comfortable with the task at hand. You've got over that overwhelm, you've got over that procrastination and now is plain sailing.

In breaking it down into a small chunks you'll get there, it'll feel comfortable, and you'll just start flowing with everything.

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