How many times have you put off doing something? I know, it will be better to begin tomorrow, next week, next month… and before you know it another year has gone by and you still haven’t written that novel, lost that stone in weight or finished that jumper you’ve been knitting. Are you waiting for the perfect time? Well, let me tell you from experience, the perfect time will never materialise. It’s no good waiting for the Monday, the first of the month – and especially not the first of January. You are doomed to failure before you have even begun. It’s not that you have set your sights too high, after all there’s nothing wrong with aiming high – I would absolutely encourage you to do so. But the last thing you need to do is make the day you are to begin heavy with expectation. No wonder we so often fail to even make the smallest step.
No matter how often we hear the phrase ‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step’, no matter how much we say we understand exactly what it means we fail to put it into practice.
We are not going to write a novel, not in a day anyway but if we say we will write one line, one paragraph well, we can do that can’t we…?
And the same goes for losing weight. You don’t lose one stone in a week, after all, it took much longer than that to put it on. Why not aim for a pound a week? Why not choose to replace one biscuit with an apple, one coffee with a drink of water. Small changes are going to make the difference. Not the perfect day of writing with a huge word count, not the perfect day of eating with no lapses, one small change at a time is far better than nothing and guess what … before you know it you will already have started.
And it’s no use saying you are too old either. I was so inspired by the article in You magazine this Sunday -Never Past your Prima – about ladies of a certain age taking up ballet dancing in later life. Some of them had danced as children while others had no experience at all. Looking at the photos of those ladies in their ballet blacks made me want to rush off and enrol in a class that day. But I didn’t, and I probably won’t because at the moment I don’t have a passionate urge to do so. There is only so much time in our day and we have to prioritise. The crux of the matter is – what is so important to you that you can’t put it off?