When will I be ready?
Apr 20th, 2008 Posted in Being in the process | 2 comments »
Preparation: getting my ducks in a row by ZedBee
How to balance preparation with action
I love learning. I love reading. Both of these things are considered virtuous in our society. Yet I’ve recently realised that neither of these will actually get me where I need to be. The only way to make a change is through action, even if the change is simply one in your head. Only by enacting that change though your day to day life will it become solidified into a habit and become real for you. Often, however, we do not take action because we do not feel ready to do so.
Preparation
What reading and learning do achieve, however, is preparation. This preparation provides us with tools, ideas & perspectives that enable us to react to the problems we encounter quicker, make better informed decisions, and generally makes our lives easier. Here’s the catch, preparation is to support our actions. Not an action in its own right. It is a means, not an end.
As with all things in life, balance is the key. Here I’m looking at the balance of action-preparation.
Preparation can include (but is not limited to) getting motivated, reading a subject, taking a class, brainstorming, writing a plan, talking through your ideas, blogging or writing about your ideas, buying the materials and/or tools for a task/job/hobby, making lists of ideas, writing post-its, drawing detailed diagrams of how it all fits together, compiling lists of quotes, copying passages from your favourite books and doing self-help exercises.
These are all things I have done recently, but I was starting to feel ‘weighed down’ by it all. Trying to keep in memory all the insights that I had gleamed, trying to juggle all these ideas & make them fit neatly together. Panic set in as I felt that I would never by ready.
Protection
So why do we prepare at all? All of the above serve as protection. When we feel prepared, we feel protected against surprises, against failure, against forgetfulness, against ignorance, against ridicule, against wasted effort. Protection can be very useful, helping to prevent worst-case scenarios and providing a little confidence boost, but it is possible to overdo it. I liken preparation to armour. Think of an old medieval knight fighting a Zorro-style swordsman. One is slow, heavy and blinkered, the other nimble, adaptive & aware. Who would you rather be?
Each item you prepare is another piece of armour you have to carry around with you to protect yourself. Make too many and you won’t be able to be move. So pick your armour carefully. Which is the most useful? Which covers the most vulnerable areas? What is the least armour you can wear to go out into the real world?
Slaying the dragon
If you feel that you need all of this armour to go out in to the world, perhaps you are trying to slay a dragon too early. Is there a slightly easier goal for which you could wear a little less armour?
What if you went out to slay the slug instead? Wear a piece of armour and see how it feels out there in the real world. Too heavy, too cumbersome, too chaffing? Take it off and try another. If it fits, wear it, but only as long as you need it. If you never get hit in that vulnerable spot, then that armour is not helping you, just weighing you down. If you get hit, it still hurts, but hopefully the wound isn’t fatal. You recover and you learn to avoid getting hit there. Eventually, either way, you no longer need that armour. Now you have some room for another piece of armour instead, letting you take on a bigger foe.
Enough of the analogy
Ok, enough slaying. If the armour is preparation, then the weight of it is time & effort. Spending some time & effort on planning ahead is well-advised, but too much and you’ll never actually get anything done. The same resources you use for preparation are those you need for action, and at some point you must move from getting ready to actually living your life!
One last illustration
Ch 1 Exh 2 by lwiner9
If you’ll permit me one more illustration, I want to tell you about Strategic Creative Analysis (SCAN). With SCAN you follow a set of steps and end up with a structure showing you how to achieve your goal. It is fleshed out by asking two questions: how and why. You fill in extra steps by looking at each one and asking how. You check that they are useful by asking why. ‘How’ moves you down into the detail and ‘why’ moves you up to your ultimate goal. Now imagine that you only do steps the that appear below your goal. You complete the various tasks but along the way it starts to feel hollow, because the purpose of these tasks has been forgotten. The ultimate goal is sat there stagnating whilst you get ready. The very reason you’re doing all this is not happening. If this is how you feel, then you’ve fallen into the same trap that I regularly visit: you have over-prepared.
So let’s answer the question
How much preparation should I do?
Perhaps by now you’ve got an idea in your head as to what the answer is going to be. Trust that voice, write down right now what it has to say. No really, write it down. This article isn’t going anywhere. Now compare it with mine.
Just one piece.
All you need is one idea and you’re ready.
Take the SCAN diagram above and for each step look at whether there is some way you could be living the ultimate goal already. Not in full, but in some small, meaningful way. Make a start. Remember why you’re doing this. For every step you should have a slug you can slay. For every piece of preparation you should have at least one goal-oriented action that it supports.
So how do I apply this idea
Right now, you will either have some preparation done or none.
If you’ve already got some bits of armour lying around then have a look at them all and pick just one piece. One idea, one plan, one diagram, one chart, one list. Now with that one piece of armour find your slug and get out there!
If you’ve just got the idea and want to know when to start, the answer is: start now! That one idea is your first piece of preparation. Find your slug6 and put some time and effort into doing something.
And after the slug?
One reason for over preparation is the worry that after you’ve made this first step you won’t know what to do. You have to know everything about the whole process to be able to start. This is just not true. This is one of those voices in your head you can ignore.
The beauty is, that by going through the actions necessary to slay your slug you will automatically end up with new lessons, ideas and inspiration. That’s how it works.
Don’t believe me? Well, ok, I’m not that surprised. It’s a leap of faith after all. But if that doesn’t convince you to get out there right now, then ask yourself this question:
What is the worst that can happen if you do this one small step and then that’s it?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting something and then learning from your experience that it is not right for you. That you don’t wish to take it any further. Some call it failure, others call it learning from experience. I know which I would prefer to call it.
The alternative is infinitely worse to my mind: you sit there planning for hours, weeks, months even, preparing for a dragon that you’re never going to meet. Isn’t it better to have slain the slug and learnt from it, than to waste all that time and effort?7
The 12 step plan
For any fellow preparation addicts out there (yes, you’re an addict, admitting it is half the battle) here’s my 12 step plan to unhooking your dependency. If any one step seems too big, ignore it until you have done the one before it.
- Get most of it down on paper.Write down, in your favourite planning format, everything you can currently think of that you want to plan. We’re planning our planning here – it’s a neat dose of our favourite drug. If this appeals, then you know you’re an addict. Don’t spend more than an hour on it though. Don’t worry – we’ll come back to it later.
- Look at the list and pick out the first planning idea that appeals to you.It needs to be fun, easy and fairly quick to do & see some results.
- Find your slug.What would you feel happy doing after this step that you can’t do now? Hint: if the answer is nothing then this plan is not getting you anywhere, go back to step 2, cross that planning idea out and pick something else.
- Check your slug is related to your dragon.Will that step you’d be willing to take really get you moving towards your goal? Again, if not, go back a step and try again.
- Do it!Do your planning work then go out and slay your slug. If this seems at all scary, then you’ve not found your slug. Go back to step 3.
- Revisit your plan (this is your reward for step 5)Having done so well at step 5, you can go back to your planning plan and do some more work on it. Cross off any plans that you no longer feel you need and add any new ones you think of.As part of this I want you to start making a list. On one side write those preparations that have directly helped slay a slug, and on the other write those that you haven’t used, have discarded, or didn’t help.
- Repeat steps 2 – 6 until the dragon is defeated, or you no longer wish to pursue it.When coming up with planning ideas, refer to the list you made in step 6. See any familiar faces? Put them straight in the bin, these are not your friends, they are your enemies!
- Celebrate your success (even if you stopped after the slug). You have actually done something real!
- Repeat steps 1 – 9 for your next dragon.
- Celebrate even more success.
- Notice that you are ‘doing’ as well as ‘planning’. Notice that you have in fact been doing this ever since step 5.
- Now, let go of this plan. You don’t need it any more. Go out there, live your life and let your newly developed habits be all the protection you need.
This post is dedicated to my friend Anne. To whom I stipulate most clearly that I would never slay a dragon and certainly do not endorse the slaying of dragons. The above was merely an analogy.
