Building the Courage to Start
How to start taking action in the direction of your dreams and goals
Welcome! I’m Rachael Gaibel, a career, life + wellbeing coach, consultant and content strategist/writer. Find Possibility is a monthly newsletter focused on: finding possibilities to create meaningful change, personal growth, wellbeing, creative expression, and more. If it resonates, please share with others.
I’ve noticed certain dreams and goals feel hard to start. When I’m coaching others, I often hear them share objections or feeling stuck alongside visions. Which makes sense for people seeking a coach.
Objections: one of the inner blocks of self-doubt or fear taking charge.
Feeling stuck: not knowing where to start, either due to an overwhelming number of ideas or not coming up with any.
The objections can be incredibly loud, which can lead to quickly shutting down exploration of what could be possible. Even the act of considering something new or different can bring up inner blocks, which keeps us stuck. Or the other side is coming up with so many ideas and not knowing where to focus or what to implement.
As I shared in the post Uncover Possibilities for What’s Next, you can learn to work with the inner blocks to uncover possibilities. First by noticing the block is in charge, then by pausing to reflect, and next by shifting to having the best aspects of yourself take the lead.
This post is about what’s next after you begin working with the blocks. It’s how to start taking action to change that matters in the direction of your dreams or goals.
My perspective on how to approach starting to make progress completely changed last year when I saw the following picture and quote.
“You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But, practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.” ~Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist at Warton from his book Hidden Potential
What stood out is the stark contrast in progress if we start now versus when we perceive we are “ready.” Intentionally practicing new skills is how you become better at them to ultimately master them. What you attend to grows.
This means we must have courage to start pursuing our dreams or goals while it feels uncomfortable.
The most important way to start is to take the right kind of action. I have found two main types of action when pursuing something new:
Preparing to do the work: this is the set-up and knowledge obtainment that is a part of anything new. It could involve learning from experts.
Doing the work: this is actually building and practicing new skills required to make progress on goals or dreams.
The type of action that leads towards accelerated growth, is “doing the work.” This is also the form of action that takes us out of our comfort zone and we tend to avoid.
At times, we can hide behind preparation because it feels safer. Thinking that by focusing on preparing considerably for a long period of time, we’ll feel “ready” to do that actual work itself. While we could, as the graphic demonstrates, there are costs. We will have missed out on time we could have made incredible progress if we started “doing the work” now; not only that, but we will still need to develop the skills later.
Recognize preparation is not the target in and of itself. While preparing is valuable and necessary, much of it can be completed in tandem with starting now to do the work.
If you notice you have been spending all your time preparing without doing the work, be kind to yourself. Know you can shift your focus. You don’t have to listen to the voice that says you can’t take certain types of action until you are ready. The voice that tells you that you need to prepare for many more months before focusing on the actual skill development. It is likely coming from your inner critic, as a clever tactic trying to keep you safe. You don’t have to take direction from this part of you.
Here are a couple examples to distinguish between preparing and doing:
If you want to improve your wellbeing, preparing would be learning more about the topic of wellbeing, whereas doing the work would be actively making changes in support of your wellbeing.
If you want to make a change to your business or career, preparing would be focusing on the set-up and education, whereas doing the work would be practicing the skills related to what you want to pursue next.
In an example I referenced in my personal essay How I found the Good within the Difficult, I spent months learning about mindfulness first before actually meditating consistently. During that time, I tried meditating a few times, but I thought I was a “bad” meditator. On one occasion, I recall getting up and walking out of the room in the middle of a recorded guided meditation my husband and I were doing together.
Underneath my sporadic early attempts at meditating was it felt uncomfortable and really hard.
I was ultimately willing to try meditating regularly after receiving the critical performance feedback I reference in the article. I believed it would be one avenue to help me reach my goal to show up better at work, as more responsive and less reactive. Only once I was a couple months into having a regular mindfulness practice did I make progress, see improvements and find meditation enjoyable.
I needed to truly put in the effort and make it a regular practice first before I experienced the benefits.
I share this experience because it can be so common for us to stop putting in effort when something gets hard, usually when we have barely gotten started. Without practicing the new skill for long enough, we often don’t receive the benefits.
How can you focus on doing the work to create change that matters?
Make sure you are clear on what your actual dream or goal is. What is it really about? What do you deeply want? Connect to why it’s important to you. Reminder preparation is never the goal itself.
Balance preparing in conjunction with doing the work. Practice the skills you want to develop as you learn about them.
Reframe how you approach taking action to improve your skills. Bring an experimentation mentality, prioritizing learning and growth.
Create safe spaces to develop skills when you are starting out—this is where having an accountability partner, a coach, program, peer group, etc. can be incredibly valuable.
Recognize you aren’t supposed to already have mastered the skills or have all the answers yet. Instead, as you take action, you’ll improve using the skills and learn more to fill in the gaps of what you don’t yet know.
Access the courage that is already within you. Consider how you could make progress to create change from a place of courage.
Ask yourself: What’s one way you could start making progress now?
“Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is fear walking. Walk directly into your fears, with your values as your guide, toward what matters to you.” ~Susan David, Psychologist at Harvard Medical School
The deeper significance is that it takes courage to honor your dreams and goals. Grounding in courage can help you go forward when it feels scary or uncomfortable. Let your values guide you to take action in service of what matters to you.
Photo from Pixaby
Contact me to learn more about how coaching could help you create change that matters in your life and work.