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I wish you knew just how easy it could be.

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How many times have you said to yourself “wow, that was so much easier than I thought” ? Certainly in my experience it is most times after I have been telling myself something will be difficult.

What unlocks it for me is not the simple act of taking action. There is something before that.

I’m noticing that I’ve written ‘unlocks’ because so often I've thought there must be some kind of key. Assuming something needed to be ‘unlocked’ I’d get right on the case of searching for that right key, the key that fitted, the one that slipped into the lock effortlessly and would turn as easily as a hot pin in butter. I’ve even got excited before conversations with my own coach, looking forward to finally discovering that final key point that I need to work through, that one piece of self improvement, that one missing piece that has been holding me back

An endless search that could not possibly bear fruit since neither the key or indeed the lock actually exist.

As long as you search for something that does not exist I absolutely guarantee you will never find it.

But what a great distraction all that searching provides!

What ‘unlocks’ it for me before action? A very simple, subtle yet fundamental change in my thinking. Much like if you’ve ever tried to open a door, pushed or rammed against it only to discover that you were pushing the side with the hinges, or maybe you needed to pull rather than push, the simple change in thinking is usually for me not an actual change in thinking at all (‘I need to open this damn door’) but a willingness to let go of how seriously I am taking my thinking (‘is that door real?”)

Believing it is difficult is not the same as thinking it is difficult. Thinking is not the same as knowing. Believing is choosing to know.

I might think something is going to be so damn difficult I may as well not even attempt it. But only believing that thought keeps me out of action. Most times it really doesn’t matter what I think because experience tells me most times I am wrong. Things are very usually much easier than I initially think.

What a great distraction all that thinking provides!

The decision to ignore my thinking takes many forms; it can be a simple ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens’ or a ‘who cares what I or others think’ or maybe ‘well, what’s the worst that can happen? Would I be okay with that?’ They all amount to the same approach, my indifference to my own thinking, mixed in with a sprinkling of adventure and willingness to ‘screw up’ (aka get unexpected results).

As humans our ability to predict outcomes, timing or any aspect of the future is often appalling. But we can be masterful at being willing to allow the flow (often called ‘going with the flow’) to let things take the shape they will. When we stop lying to ourselves in our attempts to tell ourselves we do know what will happen or how difficult something will be, we are left with not knowing. It’s from that place of not knowing that adventure and magic comes.

Is not knowing scary? Maybe, if you think it is. You can also choose for it to be exciting.

And within that not knowing is still one FACT we have in our favour. Almost always things are so much easier than we initially think. If we look at the evidence of that, we can start to believe our next endeavour may also be easy. We can begin to know just how easy it could be.
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