Doing Difficult Things

Have you ever found yourself writing your ‘to do’ list - either for the day or week ahead or for longer term career/business goals, and never quite getting around to doing the Most Important Thing? Something else always comes up to take the time that we had planned to do it in, and the resistance gets worse and worse the closer we get to the deadline. Ever wondered why?

As some of you may know, I’m currently doing the altMBA; a month long intensive leadership development programme (mostly evenings and weekends) designed by Seth Godin for leaders who want to create change in the world. Week 3 has been another fantastically intense week of thought provoking learning and discussion. We’ve learnt in depth about working with constraints as well influencing others in overcoming those constraints.

There are generally four reasons why we don’t Get Things Done

We might not know enough...

We might not see clearly enough...

We might not believe enough...

or we might not care enough to do the work...

Turns out that all of those reasons are rooted in evolution and our Lizard Brain. The part of our brain that predominately wants to keep us safe. The part of the brain that is activated when we face danger and gives us the option for either fight or flight. But as we evolved, we grew another part of our brain - the Limbic System - focused on connecting, our emotions, sharing and then we evolved again with our Neo-Cortex - which drives us to create new things/challenge the status quo.

But because Creating Something New (or doing something difficult or hard or something that requires us to step out of our comfort zone), our Lizard Brain speaks up - it’s just doing its job after all - trying to protect us and keep us safe. “Look, you don’t have all the answers here yet, why risk getting it wrong? Much safer to wait and do a bit more research?” Or we listen to The Critics who also feed The Lizard. And when The Lizard speaks-up, it slows us down. The list of valid excuses gets longer and longer and longer; “my boss won’t let me” “there’s no funding” “people won’t agree” “I’m going to look foolish if I fail” “I don’t have enough time”.

We like having the list - it feels safe. Because The Lizard make some good points and so we stall, we wait, we push the deadline out for getting The Thing done. Or we sabotage The Thing.

So in order to get more things done, we don’t need to be more creative, we need to learn how to quieten our lizard. How do to this? The trick is to get all of our Lizard’s objections out of the way first - list all the constraints that we see - and go really deep, not just the surface ones that we can see. Do all the thinking and scenario planning upfront and work out what you need to do to overcome them. And then, most importantly, decide now that you’re going to do The Thing. Start! Put the structure into what needs to be done and once you’ve started, finish! Put a date in the diary to get it done! Don’t be lulled into needing to sharpen the saw more than you already have.

And the reason why this is so important is that we need you to be doing great things - to use the talents and gifts that you have been given to help solve the worlds problems. And if you’re too worried about making a mistake or not getting it right or about what others might think, then the world won’t get your potential genius and insight.

So do The Thing. Plan it and Start. But most importantly, Do It!