When You Don’t Know Where To Start, Start Where You Are
I was recently stumped by my overwhelm with the prospect of cleaning our house. I wanted to do so many things that day and cleaning the house was just too much. Especially the floor. It’s just a lot of the same thing over and over. I remember staring at the vastness of the floor wondering how I’d get it done and where I should start first. I ended up doing it one inch at a time and I started right where I was. I only made sure that I had my washcloth ready in my hand, and the cleaning agent spray in the other. That’s all I needed. And I got down to it. Quite literally. I don’t use extension poles or mops, because no matter what you use, there are no shortcuts. It’s still the same amount of square footage to cover and you still need to do it. Doesn’t matter how.
Where am I going with this? The floor is just the floor and cleaning is just cleaning. That’s right, but the overwhelm is personal. The overwhelm can ruin your dreams of a clean house as easily as it can ruin your life plans. You need a simple strategy to cope with the dream killer.
Overwhelm happens when you experience too much of too many things at once. It can be information overload, too many social media posts making you feel like you can never win in life, or too many tasks to be done at once. To sort through all of this data and prioritize your next steps is daunting. You need to make decisions and you are worried you will make the wrong ones. By the time you are done analyzing your situation, you feel tired, deflated…maybe even scared. You haven’t even started doing anything and your motivation index falls down to pretty much zero. You’re confused. That’s analysis paralysis getting in the way. You want to quit or have someone take care of it for you. What happens when neither is an option? Where do you start? Right where you are.
This simple strategy — start where you are, use what you have, do what you can (Arthur Ashe) — can get you out of your overwhelm pretty quickly. Take the first step, make the first move. If you love playing board games, you know you can’t start the game until you place your pawn on the “start here” square. When you are hiking or going on a road trip, chances are you may get lost every now and then. You look at the map, and it tells you “you are here”. That’s the best place to be to make a start. And once you do, you’re on the move. You get to the next point, and you do it again. Step by step, you move along the path to your dream life, or wherever you need to get. It does not matter if you must make a detour along the way, because you know that when you get lost or stuck, you start over right where you are.
“Confidence is built on accomplishment.” , so don’t forget to check in with yourself after you’ve taken the first step, and the second, to acknowledge that you are moving along. One of my favorite personal development leaders, Brendon Burchard, summed up confidence so well: it is the ability to figure things out. I’ve used that guideline pretty much since I first heard it. Surely, I experience bumps along the way, but this motto gets me from place to place, from one point in life to the next, pretty much without fail.
To get through the overwhelm or the analysis paralysis, just start where you are. Have the confidence that you can and will figure things out as you go along. Be mindful of the present moment but don’t let too much information ruin your plans. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Lao Tzu) and the floor gets cleaned one inch at a time.Tomorrow I’m going to repot some plants. I have so many! I’ll just start with the one in front of me.
