Why ACTION will bring you the clarity you crave, and NOT thinking
I hope you enjoy the below! Once completed I recommend you check out the Minimum Viable Lifestyle (MVL).
You wonder all your life why you’re carrying that roadblock around, why you can’t move past that obstacle.
You have that mountain to climb, and no matter how much time you spend thinking of it, through it and every which way about it, you can’t decide how to proceed.
Maybe you’ve been scared to try something new because of what people might think of and say about you.
Maybe you’ve always wanted to start a business but never knew how to get started?
Maybe you’re feeling stuck in a relationship?
Maybe you’re feeling stuck in the past? Or the present?
Well on an isolation-induced walk this weekend, I was listening to some enriching material when I came across this particularly profound video of Marie Forleo.
It spoke to me so powerfully and sparked the ‘ah-ha’ moment that was so powerful, it almost brought me to tears on the footpath.
Have you spent too much time living in your head?
I don’t know about you, but I’m a self-diagnosed over-thinker.
Sure, it has some benefits and upsides. An analytic brain, a broader perspective on topics and tendency to try and thoroughly understand the positions of others.
But when at an impasse over-thinking is torture. It reads too much into the actions of others, and creates mountains out of mole hills.
What Forleo says in this video is so powerful because it shatters the drawbacks of over-thinking, which is such a common trap we find ourselves in when facing our biggest questions.
It reminds me of something I came across recently in Anthony De Mello’s writing, which was also a major revelation:
“Problems only exist in the human mind”. — Anthony De Mello; Awareness
As well as,
“That negative feeling is in you, it’s not in reality, so stop trying to change reality” — Anthony De Mello; Awareness
Escaping a prison of our own making
The idea that there is a level of ourselves that we can’t access through thinking, only through action, gives us the key to escape the prison of over-thinking and agonising over our deepest complexes.
Because once we take action, ideas are no longer ping-ponging around in our head, spinning virally out of control and making us mad.
When they are expressed and manifested by action, they encounter feedback by their interaction with reality.
The simple example is, you try something you were also scared to dip your toe into — say, dancing, and you find that you either a) love it or b) hate it.
Or, you try starting a business. Or take a gamble on someone new. Or take that trip you thought you couldn’t afford to take.
And, whatever the outcome, there is no real loss. I’m a big believer in that we always have control over the most powerful thing, which is, how we react. As such, we can choose to see disappointment as another obstacle, or just another step on the journey.
Decisions are not good or bad, they are just decisions.
This whole thought bubble started by listening to an episode of Amy Porterfield’s Podcast: Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast №314: Become the Most Decisive Person You Know. I thought it would be about marketing, but really, it was a deep exploration of decision-making in a way that relates I think to all decisions in life.
The idea she brought forward was simply that one stops judging decisions, refereeing them to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Rather, a decision should be made on the relevant information available at the time.
And if things don’t turn out well enough? Why then, one simply makes another decision.
It made me ponder whether, maybe, the only ‘bad’ decision is indecision, at a time when a decision is required. As the more decisions we make, the more feedback we get from the world and the more progress we can realise.
By doing nothing we will perhaps be condemned to being nothing in some way. Decision I think implies action, and action unlocks a deeper part of ourselves that we cannot access through thinking alone.
It unlocks clarity, and clarity allows us to have direction, and direction gives us the sense that we finally know where to go next.
Joe.
To assist with clarity, you can now check out The Minimum Viable Lifestyle (MVL) or other similar material at www.withjoewehbe.com
