Stop Stewing and Start Doing
Have you ever heard the phrase “The stewing is worse than the doing.”?
(Well, if not, you have now!)
And maybe, when you hear this, you know exactly what it means.
You can pinpoint a time you’ve experienced this.
Maybe it was even this week.
Maybe it was this morning.
(And if you feel this quote in your bones, then you can stop reading and just repeat this to yourself the next time you’re feeling compelled to procrastinate.)
But if you’re not quite sure what this means, let me give you a little example.
You have a thing you need to do.
It’s on your tasklist.
It has to be done.
You know it has to be done.
And, in fact, you even know it has to be done by you.
But you don’t really want to do it.
So, aspirationally, you put in on your list for today.
And then you don’t do it today. (Because, again, you don’t wanna!)
And so you move it tomorrow.
And you don’t wanna do it then either.
So, you push it again.
And so on, and so on, until the day comes when you absolutely have to do this thing otherwise bad things will happen! (Are “taxes” ringing a bell?)
And then, you finally do the thing.
And it’s usually not quite as bad as you thought.
Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s actually happened here:
You’ve thought about this thing for days, weeks, possibly even months.
You’ve felt bad about yourself for not doing it for days, weeks, months.
And you still had to do the darn thing in the end.
In fact, you might have spent more time thinking about NOT doing this thing than it actually took to do the thing.
So, that’s it.
The stewing was, in fact, worse than the doing.
But it’s not all bad news!
Because that’s all in the past.
And you can only move forward.