Yes! Starting something new does not recognize “late” in its dictionary. But, why most of us keep delaying ourselves on doing something new? Before telling my own experience, I would like to share a story inspired from my daily life (I changed the name of subjects to keep it anonymous) with a little bit modification.
Meet Mandy, she is charming, cheerful, energetic and she do not really like quiet environment. She shares a flat with her friends, Maria and Michelle. Most of the time when she saw Michelle is doing something in her room, she will ask her what she was doing, and why she was so quiet. Michelle told her that she works on her personal projects. (That question was the ice breaker only though) Then she kept talking that how bored she was.
When a conversation was happened, Maria will join in usually. Both Mandy and Maria will start to talk about anything with Michelle join into the conversation occasionally. It is a usual girl talk, from clothes to TV shows, from shoes to food. But, later on the topic how bored Mandy is will come in again.
Maria and Michelle often give her suggestion on doing something new. However, most of the time Mandy will provide reasons or other considerations on not doing it. Occasionally she says that she will do it, but when comes to the day, she backed up, ended up not doing it. Though that she was really did it on other occasion.
Don’t you feel familiar with this story? Or maybe you were in this similar situation?
There are many reasons on not doing something new. From my own experience, there are two reasons which make me backed off in the last minute on most of time. The first and most reason I didn’t do what I would like to do is, I do not want to break my cycle. And, the second reason is I was too nervous to start something new.
Breaking the cycle is quite hard for me still. But, I learned to recognize the points when I’m having it as well as learned to know myself better. I read some articles years ago on this (which I forgot the author and the book title, I’ll put it here once I found it). Breaking the cycle is also associated with getting out from our comfort zone. When we are doing something repetitively and turning into habit, it is quite easy to feel bored occasionally. When boring comes more and more often, we will feel that we are really bored. We feel like we don’t like the situations we are in, we don’t really appreciate what we have, we just feel want to have something new or doing something that we never done before.
But, when it comes to execution, our self defense mind will ask us, do we really sure whether we want to do that, how about we will get something bad, bla bla and many more negative thoughts. I used to listen to them and I will feel bad after that most of the time. The second reason I mentioned before, actually, is a result of our mind too.
And I believe that the more we experienced it, the better we know ourselves, the faster we recognize the roadblocks/mind blocks and find the solutions. As classic saying said, “Practice makes perfect”.
So this year, I found my dreams, made my to-do-list, made a plan on how to do it (this is one of many ways on how I overcome my mind block), then I’ll evaluate my plan from time to time to make sure I can achieve it. How about you?
PS: I dedicate this post to inspire all of us, not too afraid to do something new this year.
