This is Optimal Living Daily episode 2934, Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy, by Tonya Lester of TonyaLester.com, and I'm Justin Malek. I read to you every day with permission from the authors. We have a bunch of shows to optimize your life covering different topics. Just search for Optimal Living Daily wherever you're hearing this and you should be able to find all of our shows.
But for now, let's get right to it as we optimize your life. Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy, by Tonya Lester of TonyaLester.com My client, Annie, was a professional photographer who put her career on hold when she had children. Ten years later, she barely picked up her camera even though she loved photography and was eager to resume her career. Instead, she beat herself up for letting her skills go dormant.
She criticized herself for being financially dependent on her husband, and she lamented the fact that she lost her identity outside of being a wife and mom. At first, what seemed to be tripping Annie up was how to get started. She'd sit down to write emails to old contacts, feel overwhelmed about what to write, and ended up walking away from her computer. She had a passion project she'd begun years ago and thought might be good enough to get a grant to finish it, but couldn't make herself sit down and actually apply.
She'd tell herself the work wasn't good enough for that her subject matter wasn't current enough, so why even try? Other days, the kid would stay home from school sick, or she'd get a call that the school was desperate for volunteers to take on lunchroom duty, and she'd say it was hopeless. Her schedule was too chaotic to try to do anything but get through the day. Her days flew by in a blur, and she'd never got to her photography.
We went through all her responsibilities to pare down what really needed to be done. Annie figured that, barring an emergency, she could do everything she needed to do for her family and still have two hours a day to devote to restarting her career. I said, two hours every day is a lot of time. No it's not, she said, already discouraged.
I used to have so much energy. I worked twelve hours at a stretch. I don't know what's happened to me. But she conceded that even fifteen minutes, let alone two hours a day, was better than the zero she was currently doing.
Unfortunately, once Annie cleared the two hours, she started frittering away that time by returning emails, ordering various household necessities, and scrolling on Twitter. What is wrong with me, she asked. Why am I so lazy? I asked Annie to sit for a minute and notice how she felt.
What were the sensations in her body? Was there something underneath the feeling of laziness? After sitting quietly and tuning into herself, she opened her eyes and said, I feel fear. Annie said she felt paralyzed every time she started to do any work.
She's so fearful that her earlier career had been a fluke or that she didn't just have any talent anymore. What if I devote all this time and energy to something and it doesn't work? Has this happened to you? Do you wallow in indecision, unable to figure out where to start or what to work on?
Do you tell yourself that you just are a procrastinator, unable to hold yourself accountable or move forward on projects, life changes, or risks that are important to you? Do you fantasize about who you could be if you planned a big trip or went back to school or wrote a novel? Do you feel excited and happy while you're daydreaming, only to come down to earth with a thud when it's time to actually work on the bright shiny thing? When you're not alone, most people feel this way when they're trying to make a change or to level up in areas that are important to them.
Some part of them imagines that the disappointment of trying and failing is worse than the disappointment of doing nothing at all. If that part of you that is scared of failure is in the driver's seat, any movement is going to feel impossible. Instead, you're going to feel overwhelmed, confused, and lazy. We're here a few things to think about when you're trying to bust out of that cycle.
Number one, action begets action. When you're feeling fearful and insecure, a common procrastination tactic is to let ourselves get hung up on how to begin. We wallow in indecision even when the decisions are relatively small. If you're looking for a new job, it doesn't matter whether you start by updating your resume, reaching out to your network, or looking at job sites.
Just pick something. If you set off on the wrong path, you can simply course correct and keep moving forward. We figure things out by doing them, not by thinking about doing them. Number two, be mediocre.
Nothing's called momentum faster than worrying if you're good enough for viewing your efforts through a critical lens. Even the most talented among us, don't set the world on fire our first time out of the gate. American radio personality Ira Glass describes the problem he sees with most creative starting out as a gap we have between our taste and our abilities. He says that the only way to get through it is to create a volume of work and keep at it until the quality of your work catches up with your ambitions.
Annie wasn't able to get started until she admitted to herself that at least initially she probably wasn't going to be the same photographer she'd been and that was okay. The gap between her taste and her skills would close once she got to work. This is true for everyone, not just artists. Who you dream of becoming isn't who you are at the beginning.
What stands in your way of becoming that person is good old-fashioned practice. And number three, consistency is the only metric. Quality, opportunity, and momentum always flow from consistent action. It makes sense to focus most of our attention on our systems and habits.
Can you think of a single experience where you did something at least three times a week and didn't get better at it? As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, quote, You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results, end quote. We can't always control our outcomes, but we have a lot of control over our process. For Annie, her first efforts after her long hiatus weren't as good as what she was doing at the height of her career when she was rusty.
But when she started shooting every day, even if she was just messing around with her kids, she began to get back in her groove and her confidence slowly crept up. We make so many barely conscious decisions to avoid pain and disappointment. But how much worse is it to take that risk, fail, and then be able to move on, rather than to live in limbo and inaction? What eventually helped Annie get through her fear was to set a timer for 45 minutes and spend that time on her photography.
It didn't matter how quickly or slowly she moved, what she accomplished, or whether it was any good. She just had to only do photography-related activities until the timer went off. If she felt up to it, she set the timer for another 45 minutes, but if not, she could be done. A marathon is run one mile at a time.
A book is written sentence by sentence. An instrument is learned note by note. Anything done consistently will eventually get finished and probably be pretty good. Predictably, once Annie started working consistently, it turned out she was not awful.
She was every bit as talented and creative as she'd been 10 years earlier. Annie's projects quickly gained traction, and 45 minutes grew into 90 and then more. By the end of the year, her career had gained enough momentum. She had collaborations that kept her energy up and ensured accountability.
She'd become successful by admitting she wasn't confused, overwhelmed, or lazy. She's just scared. It's okay to be scared and move ahead on your goals anyway. You just listened to the post titled Feeling Confused, Overwhelmed, or Lazy by Tony Lester of TonyLester.com.
Thank you to Tonya. I'm not perfect and struggle with this sometimes too in different ways and areas of my life, but the positive example I like to come back to in my own life is this podcast. For me, it serves as a reminder that this can be done. It follows along pretty much exactly as Tony described.
Possibly one difference is that I did feel like my back was against the wall and that I needed to create something new or else go back to working for someone else full-time, so I did have that extra pressure, but still, the steps were pretty much what Tonya said. In the beginning, I just needed to start moving, reaching out to authors to get their permission, learning how to make a podcast, where to upload the files, all that stuff. I ended up buying an online podcasting program to guide me along the way, and while that did help me, I do want to pause here to talk about that aspect. Buying things, tangible or intangible like a course, might feel like action, but it's really the lowest form.
It can be easy for us to put our credit card in, but then actually doing the work, that's the hard part. So be careful with that. It's really easy to want to buy business cards and a domain name like a website, and not even do real work of actually doing what the business is all about, so we have to be careful. But continuing on, if you listen to episode one of this podcast, I think this podcast has come a long way.
I can say it was mediocre at first. I'm not sure how much has improved, but I like to think it has over all these years since 2015. And the last consistency, I've recorded this podcast when I'm sick or when I don't feel like it in the spirit of keeping up that consistency, and I do think it's played a massive role in making this podcast successful. So all that to say, bottom line, I agree with Tonya.
Now with that, have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.