The Art of Beginning

In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about beginning something that we all need to do either on a new project start a new job move to a different city be in a different relationship Beginnings are sometimes uncomfortable. And guess what, that’s perfectly natural. We reach to that, that feeling of safety, we want to know our environment. We want to be able to see around every corner and we don’t want to have blind spots that are going to sabotage us. In medicine, those blind spots are called scotomas. It’s a diminished vision in our field of view, therefore, it’s unpredictable. It’s stepping outside of what we consider safe. And we react dramatically different individuals react differently to this to this phenomena. And I’ll say there’s two core kinds of people, you have the one person who embraces it, who sees the possibility more than anything else.

And I’m not going to say they, they don’t fear or feel uncomfortable, but they embrace the possibility. And you have the other kind of person who seems like they’re always on the fence, right? Should I stay and be super uncomfortable? Or should I retreat? And so what’s familiar? Should I go back to what I’ve known, and where that’s been predictable and safe, and, and I don’t have to really do anything that’s going to really challenge me. Now, I personally, have had an opportunity to experience this firsthand in college and after college and moving all around my whole life. I think it’s prepared me for this. But there’s one instance that that I recall very fondly I had opportunity to move to Paris in 2006. And I was berated by questions.

Everybody assaulted me with questions like, why are you doing this? You don’t know the language, you don’t know anybody? You’re not moving for a job? Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself out in that space where you don’t know what’s gonna happen. And I took it on as an adventure just for those reasons. I said to myself, I have an opportunity to become somebody more than I am now. I went out there for who I could become. And I guarantee you I didn’t come back the same person as I left. And in college, I’ve seen it play out in a couple different ways. So when people want to retreat and go back home, what do we call that? homesickness? Right? You’re you’re very comfortable at home.

And that’s what I call it home. Right? And sometimes in our own ambitions in our own quest for greatness and our own desire to be better than we’ve been before. We’re homesick. Who are you going to be? How are you going to challenge it? If we know this exists? How do we prepare for it? How can we become better? By doing better by knowing more? How can we acclimate to this new environment, this new experience and thrive? Because we’re always going to be stepping into something that now if we created a series of behaviors, and we asked people who know those questions of how do we succeed in this new space, because they’ll always be a new space, I guarantee you, Oprah isn’t satisfied. She’s opening schools and starting Thanks, Jay Z is doing deals every day and creating these things called new rules.

So it’s always gonna be something new. As big as you get. There’s always more it’s natural to expand. So therefore, it’s natural. To be in a new place, and therefore it’s also natural, be uncomfortable. But if we can prepare ourselves by asking and soliciting advice from people who’ve been there, who know more and embrace it as an adventure and a challenge about who we He can become by who we can grow into about what we can achieve with our new level of ability and skill and who we can lift up with us. It’s a completely different paradigm. It’s a completely different paradigm. So it takes a lot of courage to do what hasn’t been done before.