Apr 25, 2016
Step One: Translating the Translated, Part 4
There’s any number of reasons why it’s good to share your progress as you go. The first is accountability. Chances are your education instilled in you a heightened sense of accountability, to get it done no matter how long you may have procrastinated in the first place.
Part of making accountability - and any habitual procrastination - work for you is how you set your deadlines. Your specific goal should have an overall deadline, but those measurable bits of progress should also heave deadlines. Measurable progress within stepping-stone guidelines, not exact steps.
Exact steps are for when you say to yourself “What needs to be done that I can do right now while i’m in the headspace to work toward me goal?” They’re not for setting weekly progress deadlines. Progress deadlines are there to motivate you to act upon whatever exact steps you think of while you are working (much the same way as waiting till the last minute to get a school paper done suddenly lights a fire under your butt to sit down and actually do the friggin’ writing).
Another reason to shared you progress is to use the momentum of working and and sharing the project to build up the habit of continuing to work on it in whatever small way you can even when you are not in the flow of the work. Little acts build up and any little progress that gets you to a measurable bit of progress is all your project is asking of you. Your ideas are an extension of yourself, they want what you want; execution.
All you have to do for the world to know that you are real, is to get out of your house and interact with someone in some way. The same goes for your ideas. One some level, you can’t truly accept them as real until you put it “out there” where it can interact with other people, each their own thoughts and ideas in need of enlivening. This goes back to the idea of giving your project weight by allowing it the importance of being share-worthy, in whatever way you feel most comfortable sharing.
A third reason to share your progress takes the question of momentum and kicks it up a notch. When you share your progress again and again (consistent sharing of consistent progress of measurable amounts) those with whom you are sharing will grow in confidence and comfort with your project and feel increasingly inclined to talk to you/interact with you in some way regarding your project and its progress. Their interest and interaction adds to your momentum which adds to your output and sharing which adds to their interactivity which all equals one thing, feedback loops.
Feedback loops, in this regard, are great. You’re getting work done, people (even if they are family and friends) are rooting for you to succeed/finish/keep going, and all this helps your brain to commit even harder to your project. You see, it’s kind of hard to doubt yourself when you’re not the only one who believes in what it is you’re doing.
Doubt is the self-critic is the anti-creative manifestation of your lizard brain/fear trying to stop you from getting mauled by a bobcat. Very often we are told to fight this part of ourselves, forgetting that sometimes the most important battles can only be won by logic. You win-over your doubt when you show your fear that continually working on your project isn’t killing you, and you drive that fact home when you open the conversation to “outsiders” who believe enough in what you’re doing to pick up the rallying cry.
Fear is the ogre, a part of our story. It’s job - in real life - is to stop us dead in our tracks before we actually wind up dead, and I think we can all admit it does a fantastic job of making every little thing we come up against into a ferocious lion. It’s a king of super-power really.
Because of this super-power we should have respect and gratitude for our fear. When it comes to our creative endeavours, however, we need to learn to address the presence of our fear - let it shakes us unexpectedly, as it is won’t to do - and then remember that creating is not a death sentence. Creating is creation is living.
Once you know what your fear and doubt are trying to do - protect you - you can then curb that need to protect the time and space you set aside for working on your project. Let your fear act as a guardian of whatever little corner or tools you have set aside to complete your goal, let your fear protect you in a way that is constructive. Your fear will not know the difference.
There is of course the risk that your fear can become a little overzealous with this new mission orientiation. A sacred space can be made less “sterile” by having a cup of coffee or light snack at your side, your precious tools need simply a special resting place where they will always go when you are done using them (whether you were using them toward your ultimate goal or for some other purpose.
It is not you who are meant to be consumed by fear, but your fear by you. Shift the focus of your fear and then syphon off some of that energy to invigorate the work you are doing. It takes some practice, persistence really, but the results are pretty fantastic.
We are surrounded by rules. Some necessary, some arbitrarily followed. Many people are so comfortable with the rules that they cannot imagine their lives without them.
When we learn to make our fear work for us, those who live the most strictly by the rules will be the most surprised. It is our work, the work of those who know “something is not right” to forge the new paths; the paths are necessary to us so that we do not lose our minds our souls in this crazy world. It is the forging of these paths which reassures the part of us that follows the rules in order to fit in that we are on to something.
What would a path be, after all, if it did not lead somewhere worth arriving?
The “original" fairy tales do not have sequels or prequels, just versions. When the characters live “happily ever after” we are being told that there are no more stories, no more adventures for them. Happily ever after means never doing anything worthy of mention ever again.
That’s what I’m going against when I say that I want to live happily ever out there. I want an adventure today and today and today, the way life is meant to be lived; with new stories starting whenever an old story is ending, sometimes even in the middle of another story so that various stories or our lives are happening simultaneously.
This is fairy tale living is what Master Cat teaches by example: a miller’s son is a marquis is worthy of the most beautiful princess in the world; a miller’s cat is a gentleman is a trickster is a hero is a lord in his own right; a king is a rule-enforcer and rule-bender; a princess is the thrill of knowing in our bones that we are on the right track to our happily ever out there; field-hands are the proof we have laid out for ourselves that there is something to this thing we are building; and ogre is doubt and fear and our survival instincts in need a little re-direction.
We are each of us the whole story with its characters the different aspects of ourselves. We have only to look to ourselves to see what story we are playing out, and to use that to our advantage. The cat saw and made it work, why not us?