Let Go of the How

How many times do you turn away from or turn down something positive because you don’t immediately know how to get to the goal? The conversation probably sounds something like this: “I really want to but I don’t know how.”

The funny thing is there’s complete truth in that statement. You don’t know how to do something if you’ve never done it before. There’s not a single thing you do now that you knew how to do beforehand – even walking! OK, well maybe breathing is the only thing we don’t have to learn.

So now that we’ve got that established, why do we let the ‘how’ stop us from doing the things we want to do? Well, frankly it’s simply an excuse to stay in our comfort zone. If we don’t know how to do something, then we won’t actually be able to do it. That is until we learn how to do it, for which we can then make additional excuses.

Focusing on the ‘how’ is also about protection. We want to know everything before we get started to make sure we can be successful at it. We want to know if there will be any pitfalls or hardships along the way and have the opportunity to plan for them in order to avoid them. In reality, we just want to skip the learning process altogether. Unfortunately, we choose to give up on our dream before we’ve even started.

So, we need to reframe the “how.” Instead of saying no to our dream because we don’t know how to do it, we should turn it around and say yes to our dream and then ask, “now how do I do it?”

In my next post, I’ll share some practical tips and tricks to help further reframe the “how” and take that first step out of your comfort zone.