I was talking to a client this week about doing something they have wanted to do for years…and haven’t done anything with yet. When we started to discuss what was in the way, this lovely obstacle raised its head “I haven’t done it up til now”. I love this obstacle, it’s just so sweet! You know, pretty, colourful, no nutritional value at all.
Seriously, there’s nothing to this obstacle – it’s sleight of hand, it’s a mirage, it’s not real at all. There’s no substance to it whatsoever. Yesterday I hadn’t driven a certain way home from Birmingham Heartlands Hospital. Today, I did. The fact that I hadn’t ever done it before had zero bearing on whether I could do it today.
I could, of course, have told myself “I’ve never done that before, so I won’t now”, but I didn’t. Actually I came home that way precisely because I never had before! Pretty much every time I drive home from Heartlands Hospital I go a different way…often by accident because I miss my turning! Anyway…
Just because you have never done something in the past doesn’t mean you can’t do it now.
I do understand this self-imposed limitation. So do elephant keepers. When elephants are babies, keepers will tie them to a stout post which they can’t pull down, because they are small. When they’re big, they have learned that they can’t pull down the post, so they don’t try. The bitter irony is of course, that a full-grown elephant can easily escape.
It’s called Learned Helplessness. Animals (and we) learn that they cannot do something, or there are unpleasant and painful consequences for trying. So we don’t try anymore. This makes me angry and sad all at once – especially when it’s a lie, it’s not true that you can’t do what you want. Maybe you tried before and you failed and it hurt. Welcome to the human race! Now, you use what you learned in that failure and you try again.
Perhaps you fail again, perhaps you fail less spectacularly, perhaps you get closer to success…but you always learn. Scratch the surface of many a successful person and you will find failure in their past. You will find that they made no sales/money…until the day they did. You’ll find writers who had never written a book…and then they did!
Let the story go that you didn’t do whatever yesterday – you didn’t yoga, or write, or read, or meet your friends as often as you’d like. Talking about not having done it doesn’t help you get it done. Focusing on the fact you’ve not done it simply makes you feel bad, inadequate, lazy. But it doesn’t move you forward – unless you’re looking at why you haven’t done it and how you can remove any obstacles that stopped you in the past.
Even then, the why’s are often past why’s. Like you didn’t have time when you had a full time job and 3 children under 3…but now, circumstances may have changed. Or the why might be something like “I forgot”. All you can do in that instance is remind yourself of it…and if you’re thinking of it now, you’re reminded. Now crack on and do the thing that you’ve been not doing! Sometimes looking at the why’s for past inaction is useful. Sometimes you just need to apply the cure for learned helplessness.
The cure for this learned helplessness is action.
Unless it genuinely is impossible (as in no one, anywhere, ever, has done that thing), take some action to make what you hadn’t done yesterday something you’ve now done. Before I went to Australia on my own I’d never been to Australia, travelled alone, backpacked, slept in a dormitory as an adult, or eaten Moroccan food. Before I started a business, I’d never started a business. Before I wrote a book, I’d never written a book.
Before you’ve done whatever it is you want to do, you won’t have done it (and if you don’t really want to do it, then stop beating yourself up for not having done it and start congratulating yourself for not having wasted your time doing something you don’t want to do!) It means nothing that you haven’t done it yet. Do it now. Take your past lack of action and learn from it, take past failures and learn how to succeed.
Take yesterday’s story of ‘not having done it’ and throw it in the bin!
Go and do whatever it is you want to do. Just take one teeny tiny baby step – then you’ll be a step closer to it than you were yesterday. Yesterday is in the past, it doesn’t define the future. What you do now and what decisions you make now will define your future. So take action and make the decision not to let your past inaction dictate your future.
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