I frequently meet people with great ideas, they tell me the things they want to do, the ambitions they have, how they can see people’s lives improving, and when I say OK, let’s make that happen their insecure thinking kick’s in and they get stuck and come up with all manner of reasons why they couldn’t do it, or how difficult it would be so why bother. And this often comes up in the form of ‘I don’t know how to…’.
Funny that. Back in my old NLP days ‘I don’t know how to…’ translates as ‘I know how to…’ as we can’t process a ‘don’t’!
Anyway, any idea comes fully packaged – as my friend Jamie Smart has said many times to me. That is: any idea you have contains all that you need to know to make it happen. Not necessarily the full details, but enough information to get you started and pointing you in the right direction. And as you take action, you discover new things, and gain momentum.
And the ‘how to…’ comes in the form of doing the next thing, then the next, then the next, and so on.
In physics, they would say you engage Newton’s Law of Motion: a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Or, as the strategist Mintzberg would say the strategy emerges.
In skiing, I see it as the difference between those people who try to intellectually work out how to ski and they spend many weeks and years being gripped by fear and struggle and difficulty. And then there are those people who treat it much more lightly, and discover that their mind fills in all the gaps and they progress freely. They flow with very little thinking going on.
It’s amazing what we achieve when we get out of the way of ourselves, isn’t it?