The Next Right Thing

I'm analysing myself today as I have literally waited about four weeks to find out if one of the charity shops in Grantham are taking donations. I have a LOT of stuff to donate and it's been sitting in the garage for months. I don't want to fill my car up and then find out the charity shops aren't accepting any more stuff, so I just let it sit in there mocking me. It took me a grand total of 90 seconds to find out when I finally just phoned them and asked.

Why would I procrastinate on something so minor? I really don't know. It doesn't make logical sense and it was so easy to figure out what I needed to know once I took action and just did it. Yet I've walked past my cluttered garage every day for months thinking to myself, I really need to find out if the charity shops are open.

I am not the kind of person who does things without emotion. I have family and friends who just get on and do things because they need to be done. My husband, Phil, can do that easily. It comes naturally to him. He just does what needs to be done. I seem to have all sorts of emotional crazy that happens when I need to do things. I used to have this problem when it came to emptying the dishwasher. I hated that job and I would have an emotional battle every time. I had to intentionally train myself to just do the job without emotion and now I can do it but it took a while to get to this point. It's just weird to me that I have to go through that process in lots of areas of my life. I don't seem to just be able to switch off the emotion about stuff as easily as most people can.

I know that one of the areas I struggle with is action. I like the research, and the thinking stages, but taking decisive action on things is something I am learning to do--probably very slowly, but progress is progress. When I get stuck on something, I tend to not take action because I don't know exactly what to do. In reading and watching successful entrepreneurs and business owners I am noticing that they don't do this. They take action and then adjust. Instead of wanting to find out everything about an area of the market, they will dive right in and figure out what the market is like while they're swimming around in there. I tend to be someone who stands on the side of the pool and freaks myself out that it might be cold in there, so perhaps I should wait a little longer before I dive right in. This doesn't happen in every area of my life. There are elements of life that I'll plunge into and happily figure it out while I'm thrashing around in the water, but the things that really matter to me, or the things that scare me, cause me to have this frozen-like mentality.

I have a few possible ideas for how to make some money so I'm going to take decisive positive action on one of them and fully concentrate on it for 90 days. If at the end of 90 days, I have made no progress or it doesn't seem to be taking me anywhere, I will re-evaluate and possibly back off from that idea and try something different, but I've decided I have to take decisive action Monday - Friday for the 90 day period and I'm going to write out a list of what I need to do each day and just do it. I'm not going to listen to my crazy emotions or how I feel about the to do item. I'm just going to do it and see where I end up 90 days from now.

My quote for today is from Frozen 2. Isla sings to me on the way to school in the mornings and I love the words of the song, The Next Right Thing.

Just do the next right thing,

Take a step, step again

It is all that I can to do

The next right thing

I won't look too far ahead

It's too much for me to take

But break it down to this next breath

This next step

This next choice is one that I can make

Today's photo is of Isla kicking her way to the next right thing. And if you're interested, I convinced her to sing The Next Right Thing for me so you can listen to it here.