We’ve all received Good Advice. The thing with Good Advice, though, is that it’s not necessarily New Advice. There are plenty of times when we are given a new perspective on things that gets us moving in the right direction, but most of the time, we know what we need to do – we just need to hear it from someone else.
Imagine if we could, somehow, pay more attention to that little voice in our heads that’s trying so hard to tell us we’re going in the wrong direction. I imagine we’d spend a lot more time getting things done and a lot less time tying ourselves up in knots and worrying about how to get them done.
Here’s the question we should ask ourselves more often: what happens if we try it? Will we burst into flame? Damn our children to a life of torment? Endure lemon juice on a paper cut? No, odds are, we won’t.
We’re often our own worst enemies when it comes to trying something new. It’s like convincing a child to try broccoli – there’s some fundamental misconception in our minds that we have to eat the whole thing, all at once, and that we will never be the same once we get a taste of it. Only in the rarest of instances are any of these things true. Remember – you don’t have to keep eating anything you don’t like, but you do have to at least try it.
Most of the time, we only need to take a single half-step in a new direction in order determine if we’re going the right way, or not. Which is actually pretty comforting, because by moving just a little bit at a time and looking around,we get a lot of chances to adjust our course in the right direction.
Who said change has to be some revolutionary event? Why not make it something evolutionary, full of the spirit of adventure that is willing to try new things, yet engage in rapid course correction when it’s not working?
Copyright © 2011 David Kasprzak
