Look at your schedule! Are you doing whatever it takes to go wherever you want?
Have you ever played the ‚stick‘ game on the beach?
It works a bit like this:
- run from a starting line and reach a pole (much lower than you) stuck in the sand
- once you have reached the pole, place your hand on the pole and place your other hand behind your back
- keep this position and start to spin around the pole 6-10 times
- as you finish the laps, run back as fast as you can to the starting position
Do you know what happens to you? When you finish spinning, your head wants to get back to the starting position but your legs instead seem to belong to someone else. Sometimes they take the opposite direction to the one you want to follow, stumble or run crooked.
The first time I did it (besides laughing out loud) I was caught completely off-guard, it seemed to me that a piece of my body was no longer responding to my controls and I didn’t understand why!
After the first years here in Switzerland, when I sat down to make a WRITTEN analysis of the goal I thought I had for my life, and the activities I had done in the previous year to achieve it, I felt quite the same feeling.
When everything remains only in your head and in your thoughts, from what you want to achieve to what you want to do in order to achieve it, it’s easy to find out that only a small percentage of those activities you have done take you in the right direction!
So you say you want to go back to work and then you end up using the 80% of your time to clean the house. You want to start your own business but you never sit down to plan the work that needs to be done. And at the end of the month or the year, the result isn’t the one you wanted.
But why do it?
First of all because we don’t WRITE:
the importance of writing down my own goals, thinking about the necessary activities to do, the problems I could face, and preparing an agenda starting from these, was a natural process when I managed projects at a company but bringing it back into my life every day and into my business as a freelancer wasn’t immediately automatic for me.
Then fear doesn’t help:
when you give yourself new goals, when you stretch out from the infamous comfort zone, it’s inevitable to hear the evil voice putting you in doubt and asking ‚Where do you want to go ?‘. If you aren’t well structured and if you don’t have a plan, then it’s hard to hold on and continue on your way.
Finally there’s everyday life with the unexpected and hundreds of distracting little things: children calling ‚mum‘ by an average of 200 times a day; Skype calls once in a while to see at least the face of my families and friends who are far away; the torrential rain that comes down exactly the morning you decide to start running again.
Don’t let another year, month or day pass by believing you are going in the right direction.
Just stop, take a paper and a pen and observe: are you doing whatever it takes to go wherever you want?
If you don’t know where to start from to understand what you want or you’ve already tried without getting the results you want, contact me giada.varvello@gmail.com we can meet for a talk to understand what is keeping you stuck.
