Action

Today I didn’t feel like going for my early morning walk. It had just gone 6am, the house was slowly warming up and outside looked dank and dark. I didn’t want to leave the cosiness of my home to face the frost and the cold of the early morning to walk for an hour.

Despite my feelings I did it anyway.  Barely five minutes into my walk I found myself totally absorbed. I was loving the fresh, crisp air, enjoying taking the deep breathes and having fun exhaling streams of mist into the cold air.

During my walk my mind wandered to my morning’s dilemma of not wanting to walk and I realized how close a connection this feeling has to how many times I find myself not wanting to feeling in the mood to write.

There are many occasions when I find myself feeling this way and indeed many moments when I don’t always feel confident about my ability to write. I’ll have a crisis of confidence about what I want to say, compare my writing and doubt my credibility.

But always I find there is only one way to fix this seeping fear and that is to, simply and graciously take action. What works best for me are small actions which build momentum.

The truth of the matter is you don’t have to feel ready, confident or even prepared but the very act of taking action will always move you forward and further than if you did nothing at all.

You’ll find that some of the most successful writers are not necessarily the most talented. There are many talented writers sitting in homes just like yours. The difference is that the first act and the second group don’t. The first keep going and the second group give up at some point along the way.

Taking action does not require you to write perfectly. It’s not a guarantee that all that you write will be of value (the likelihood is that most of it won’t be of use). And sometimes you’re left feeling that what you write is crap. But keeping the pen moving over the page on a regular basis is what makes you a writer rather than someone who wants to write.

You don’t need to be the most confident person to succeed. In fact many successful people lack confidence in many areas but they have mastered the skill of taking action. Repetitive action leads to practice and practice turns into a habit and a habit practiced regularly over a considerable amount of time say 10,000 hours becomes mastery. I hope you get my point.