Do It Now!
I hope you all had a very merry holiday and can you believe the end of the year is already here? At the end of the year, we tend to talk about new year’s resolutions, and do you even remember yours for this year’s? I wrote mine down and have them staring at me when I sit down at my desk and even then, I tend to forget about them. This time though, I took out that piece of paper and looked to see what I had checked off, and I did work on most. This year, however, I am not going to make any resolutions. What? I know you’re thinking that means I will have a year of accomplishing nothing. Nope. In fact, I am going to take some of my daughter’s advice yet again. Instead of making resolutions just for the sake of making them without following through, I am going to try to follow my daughter’s example. I am going to do it NOW. Not the Nike logo of “Just do it,” but “To do it NOW.”
Whenever I want to make an excuse, my daughter will look at me and say, Mom, why don’t you just go ahead and make that video? What’s stopping you?” I don’t know, maybe my lack of confidence, my lack of experience, my lack of everything? When in retrospect, I have no excuses. We live in a world where with a few clicks, we can learn about just about anything and how to do just about anything. Will we fail the first few tries? Probably, but anything worth trying is going to be met with some failure. I heard on a podcast recently that if we approached life like we did a video game level with the mindset that when we get “killed,” we can approach the level differently the next time then maybe we wouldn’t give up so easily. Why do we quit before we get started then? Why do I decide I can’t create a video? Because I look funny? Because I’m not a cute teenage girl with lots of followers? If I have learned nothing else from my daughter, I should learn that you don’t have to have followers to make something. You have to do it for you. You have to do it without expecting any followers or any likes. Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. This goes back to doing what you love for you because it’s all about what makes me happy and not pleasing other people. When I started the collaboration with my daughter, I wasn’t thinking of how many listens we would have or how many views we would get. I only thought of how much fun I would have talking with my daughter, of how it would be to connect with her and change my own narrative. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t worried one bit about the outcome. She has though. She’s been keeping me up to date on the analytics, which, thanks to our supportive audience members like yourself, we have had many more viewers and listeners than I ever would have dreamed. This happened because I got out of my own way, which means that instead of putting it off until tomorrow, I had to do it NOW. If I had waited, do you think I would have done it? We all know the answer to that. You don’t have to be a procrastinator to know the answer. I followed my daughter’s example. My daughter does the hard part. She makes the content. She puts herself out there and she does it even when she doesn’t want to, so why can’t I? I can, but I can’t put it off. Even planning and researching are part of the procrastination process. You’re putting it off. We say we have to do in order to be better prepared for whatever we are planning to do, but in essence, we are putting off the inevitable. Our fear is guiding us and not our passion. Let your passion guide you and let your fear take a back seat. In fact, put your fear in the trunk and throw away the key. You might be surprised at the results.
You might be thinking how your teen doesn’t do anything right now except maybe sleep. I beg to differ. Think about it. When your child is serious about something, that new hobby, that new car, that new video game, that new whatever they have to have, I bet they are so focused on it that they think of nothing else. If you ask them to do anything about it, they will do it and they will do it right then. We need to bottle that exuberance and motivation for ourselves. It’s not selfish, it’s self-fulfilling. It fill us up with our own happiness, so why do we talk ourselves out of it?
Think about it. What is something you would like to do right now that you have been afraid to do that you have wanted to do, but you’ve talked yourself out of for whatever reason? It’s easier to gripe and criticize yourself than to follow your heart. Isn’t it easy to come up with an excuse than to find a way to make yourself happy. Now I’m talking about being truly happy, not just buying yourself something to be temporarily, superficially happy. Don’t put it off next year. Don’t just do it; Do it NOW!
If you’d like to hear more about this topic in relation to New Year’s resolutions, listen or watch The Mother-Daughter Diaries Episode 2 where we delve into this topic with two very takes on the subject.
