TAKE THE NEXT STEP

“I dream of men who take the next step rather than worrying about the next thousand” Theodore Roosevelt.

Have you ever been busily working towards something and then suddenly find yourself hesitating just before the finish line? I think if we’re honest most of us have been right at that spot on more than one occasion. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s something simple like deciding where to go on holiday or something significant like whether to move home; when it comes to taking the next step we all can stumble and sometimes fall.

If I’m to be honest and on this occasion I will be, I think I have a greater difficulty with taking the next step than most people. I hesitate because my brain wants to exhaust every possible outcome of the decision I’m about to make and if I feel I’ve missed out on a potential outcome then I’ll procrastinate some more. Sometimes this results in me putting decisions on hold for years!

Those of us who have trawled the Self-help Sections of bookshops and surfed the pop-psych websites obviously have no trouble deducing that this behaviour is a result of the fear of failure. Clearly I’m trying to avoid making the wrong decision by not making a decision at all. Well maybe that’s true, but one way or another it has served me well in the past and I’m resolving to take the next step as often as I can in future and to deal with the consequences when they arrive.

I’ll keep you posted on how that works out for me and you can let me know how it works out for you.