How time flies when you least expect it to do so! It was like yesterday when I told my staff that it was the last day of the month and I had not written something for my Blog…. and that happened to be a month ago!
I wonder whether you face the same situation as I often do, with a desire to do something and ended up doing nothing? While we may have done some mental planning of the activities, somehow, things just seem to creep in and shift away our plans. I wanted to work on my next folding project, a fish with scales by Robert Lang. The challenge is to replicate the scales, several hundreds of them, with the most efficient way of folding. I tried but have not figured out how to do so. I put the paper aside and came back to it once in awhile but with no success. I could not get the right design to start my folding steps, although I could still do a few scales but decided to hold off until I figured out a more efficient approach. The truth is, I could have finished my fish, if I had only started the folding process rather than waiting for the ideal approach.
At work, we sometimes gave excuses not to do things because we feel that it was not the right way to do them. We sometimes claim that this is not to be done by us because someone else is the right person to do so. It is also common to hear one say that this belong to another department or another group. We will rather wait till the situation becomes urgent and we could have prevented it from reaching that state had we just started to act first. Our natural tendency actually is not to do anything. We do desire to do many things but in reality, our mind and body don’t necessary align themselves. We seldom want to act but are good at thinking about it, and of course, talking about it.
So how do we overcome this lack of action in us? The piece of paper that I wanted to fold into a fish will remain a piece of paper unless I work on it. It contains many folding lines to form the basic stages to make the scales but I stopped because I wanted to have a more efficient way to replicate the scales. Perhaps I was making excuses and not sincerely wanted to find the best way. Then my hands (i.e. my actions) wandered aimlessly and stopped momentarily, waiting for my brain to come up with a brilliant approach, and my heart will start to influence my mind to stray away from the plan and do something less challenging.
Unless our hands coordinate with our heart and mind, we will not see any results. Our actions determine whether we will transform our thoughts into a worthwhile deliverable. Our heart generates the enthusiasm or kills our desires to work on the action. Our hands, if it moved to the right location, may prompt our heart to yield to it, and once it generates enough momentum, will align our heart and mind towards completing the task. We just need to get into the action with a little push and the momentum, once set in, will bring to fruition what we had set in our minds. May we all set in our mind and heart to move our hands to follow Nike’s slogan …. “Just Do It!”