Taking A Leap with a Tiny Baby Step
Sometimes a baby step is as good as a leap of faith.
The first card of the Major Arcana is The Fool, which represents a new beginning and naivety. It depicts a person blissfully ignorant as they walk towards the edge of a cliff. It can mean taking a leap of faith.
However, I’ve been raised to be overly paranoid and cautious.
Taking a leap of faith is difficult for me. I weigh every option and over-think at every possible moment. It leads to decision paralysis, where there are so many paths in front of me that I freeze up and can’t make a decision. This leads to going back to the beginning of my thought process.
Rinse and repeat.
It played into my procrastination fantasies. If I didn’t have to make a decision, I didn’t have to have decision paralysis. So I put off having to make decisions, and as much as possible.
In April, my most favourite creative coach, Amie McNee, self-published her book For The Procrastinator. Feeling called out, as most millennials will when the word “procrastinator” is said out loud.
So I bought it.
And I put off reading it.
Until the beginning of August.
I printed the PDF out and got to reading it. It felt like I was being seen. The book prompted me to start journalling. I started to unpack all of the things I suppressed from my childhood. I started to unravel the damage that Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) caused. I felt my emotions more.
The main take-away I had was that when it came to writing and stopping my procrastination was to set a laughably small goal for myself.
So I did.
My goal is to write 100 words of my current work-in-progress before dinner.
And I have managed to write 100 words every day, and sometimes almost three times that. 300 words! For the past five years, I could hardly bring myself to write a sentence for any of my stories.
Now I know that this sounds kind of lame, but 100 words is 100 words more than no words.
I took the leap of faith by committing to my baby step goal of 100 words a day. I committed to journalling. I committed to improving myself in every way I could.
