Categories: awareness, career, fear, intention

I’m working on a project to create clarity on a particular issue in my life. I’ll let you in - it’s about who I serve and what I do to serve them. My challenge is not that I can’t identify the people I enjoy working with - they are brilliant, caring, compassionate, and creative people often working as professionals in IT, law, education, politics, and the environment. My challenge isn’t really with what I do - I help individuals and groups design strategies to move from point A to B, solve problems, increase communication, and decrease the negative effects of fear on life and business.

My challenge is that I’m too broad. I don’t want to leave anyone out, and I want to help the world to be free. As soon as I begin to hone my choices, I feel like I’m about to leave part of the world behind. Yet every business book I read for entreprenuers, my peer professionals, and even my own education says that I must create precision with how I voice what it is I do and who I do it for.

My first habit is to reinvent the wheel. I don’t want to do it like anyone else so I muddle my thoughts with how I can answer that question for myself - I can create my own unique way of asking the questions so that I come up with unique answers. Yet this is, in part, a fear mechanism taking me away from my destination of answering the question.

My second habit is to minimize what I do. I have worked with some amazing people that result in amazing things happening in the world. And I conveniently forget that and I start to tell myself that I’m not all that effective. I know deep down this isn’t true, yet fear attepts to hold me back from fully believing this. My confidence gets rattled and clarity becomes an even more distant goal.

My third habit is to say that it doesn’t really matter if I get clear at all. You’ve heard of one step forward, two steps back? This is the actual process right here! I want to obtain an objective, then I overthink, minimize, and discount the objective. Now I back further away from the objective than when I started.

Notice how each of the items above are habits. Those are past behaviors that through inertia tend to repeat themselves. The definition of inertia (from the Latin root inert being a combination of in- meaning not, and +art, meaning skill) means unskillful, sluggish, without its own power, unable to change on its own.

So I’m changing those habits. I’m meditating on the matter instead of overthinking it. I’m asking other’s what they do and who they do it for - why reinvent the wheel when I’m surrounded by great people that have already done this process? I’m allowing myself to remember that it does matter because my ultimate gift to the world is to help people acheive their own peace of mind.

Homework:

What “habit” do you find yourself in that you believe you can’t change? Smoking, arguing, driving too fast, desserts at 11 o’clock, caffeine addiction, your Blackberry tied to your waist, or a garden bed with three years of weeds? You’ve probably told yourself that you’ve tried everything under the sun - when really you’ve been in the same unclear habit pattern of inertia.

Write down that habit on a piece of paper, fold it into an airplane, throw it across the room. Where it lands, pick up the piece of paper and write down the number of years you’ve wanted to change the habit. Throw it again. Now, write down the most recent thing you’ve done to end the habit. Get an envelope out, address and stamp it, and send it to yourself. I bet you my life’s savings that you’ve never done that before - and before you know it, you’ve overcome inertia.

Truly Yours,

Joseph Lyons

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