Don't let your thoughts overwhelm you

Welcome to today's issue of The Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine. The e-zine of Motivateme: Breaking the Procrastination Habit. http://www.motivateme.info. We would like to thank you in advance for forwarding this issue onto family, friends and any other interested readers.  Please note all back issues of this newsletter are available from - http://www.motivateme.info/ezine-archive/

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Sometimes when we are faced with a brand new plan, our brains can go into overdrive. We start to panic when we think about all the various options that are open to us, or worse still we don't think we know all the answers so we are afraid to start the process - whatever that process happens to be.

OK, first things first.

Stop worrying. Mild panic is ok, but worry gets you nowhere. You may think I am joking, but actually I'm not. Worry can stop us cold as our brains go into - eeyore mode. (Eeyore mode = oh I don't know if i can do that...)

Panic on the other hand, means that you have a deadline and it's looming, or you are excited because you can't wait to start, or you are so close to finishing you aren't willing to stop right now....panic can be a good thing - occassionally. Now I am not advocating that we spend our entire lives in panic mode, that would not be good for us. But when we are faced with our brand new plan, we can get excited and yes panicked about what we should be doing first.

So, have you stopped worrying yet? The thing about worry is that we usually worry over things we have absolutely no control over. Like the weather, or whether the buses will be on time, or whether there will be a parking spot. Worry can cloud eveyrthing else that we have to do, and can sour the entire day or special event. Worrying if the service was going to be terrible, worrying over - nothing. I said stop it.

So you have your plan, and do you know what the beauty of your plan is? Well the beauty is - that most of it lies in the future. You have a finite amount of time alloted to you today, so what can you do today to get you moving towards your goal? You can't worry about tomorrow, because the steps you take today may have an impact on what you will be doing tomorrow.

Do you know what else is good about the future? It comes to you one day at a time !! that's it - you can't do next weeks part of the plan, because you haven't completed todays steps yet. So - complete what you can complete today, and make your job easier tomorrow. That's the beauty of taking the plan one step at a time. You know what the ultimate outcome should be, but each step is revealed to you as you complete the one that you are working on. And yes, you may have to make course corrections along the way. Just like we do when we are driving home after a long day at work. We don't just put the car in "drive" and do nothing, we still have to change gears, move the steering wheel etc etc, otherwise we won't get to where we want to get to now will we.

For example - my recent garden project took about 16 hours to complete (with trips to garden centres thrown in etc). 16 hours, that's less than 24 hours, 8 hours for sleeping - therefore possible to do in a single day. Unlikely though. Because when we started, we didn't know how many bags of concrete we needed to get, or paving slabs, or tonnes of roadbase, soil or plants. Each step was revealed to us as we laid the plans and then executed them, and yes - made course corrections along the way. We had no idea we were going to need roadbase when we started, but it became very obvious about half way through day two.

You see if I had known it would have taken me a torn calf muscle, ripped skin, sore foot, 150kilos of concrete, .75 of a tonne of road base and the same of soil, a tonne of pavers and a boot full of plants then I may have given up before I had started. The total plan would have completely overwhelmed me, and I may have decided that there was no way I was going to complete all that in a month let alone 16 hours.

Of course now that I know, I can be better prepared for the next phase, but that as they say is "great with hindsight"

So - don't let your thoughts overwhelm you. Do what you can today, and the tomorrows will begin to take care of themselves.

But - and the final thing for today is this - don't forget to set goals that get you excited, and yes a little panicked too....you're hardly going to leap out of bed in the morning faced with the prospect of doing just enough to get you through to the end of the day - now are you?

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