Could Your Next Step Be Easier Than You Think?

A couple of summers ago my husband and I were canoeing for the afternoon during a time when I was just getting ready to finish graduate school and looking ahead to whatever would be next.

My husband, kindly prodding me (albeit in a small boat on a quiet river from which there was nowhere to go to not have this conversation), asked what I thought I might want to do after school was finished.

Photo Credit: Chris Goldberg, Creative Commons

In what I thought counted as a great answer, I promptly started listing all the legitimate reasons it was “so hard” to figure out what to do from here.

“Well in order to do this, I’d have to do this first, but before I can do that I really need to finish up this, and this only makes sense once that is in line,” and so on and so on.

Ta-da! Question answered:

I’m just one of those super special people for whom it is just actually impossible to piece together what’s next.

Each time I was asked, “but, what do you want to do?” or “what do you think could be next?” I just described the various insurmountable steps that existed between me and any real motion.

Thanks to that conversation in the canoe, I identified a thought-habit I’m prone to lean on when I’m unsure or when I’m stuck. It’s easy for me to invent extra hoops for myself to jump through, or exaggerate the ones that are already there, so that I can put off the real responsibility of moving forward.

In short, I make things more difficult than they sometimes need to be.

In a subtle and subconscious way, I confuse the catalog of these small hurdles with an actual decision or a reason something can or cannot be done.

If I’m focused on all the tasks and to-dos that separate me from even being in a position to accomplish A, B, and/or C, then how could I possibly be bothered with the details of what it would actually mean to set out to accomplish it?

This isn’t to say that once we set our minds to something, a lovely lady with a pretty wand shows up and paves us a yellow brick road to our next destination. It is to say that, for me, it’s easy to use the tough thinking about what’s next as an excuse for why I can’t actually act.