I used to feel this glaring gap between where I was and where I wanted to be with my life. When we discover the self-improvement track, I guess we all start out with some sort of vision board and a determination to “create your ideal life”.

All over sudden you realize that you really do have a choice as to what you want to do with your life. Overnight you start seeing all the things you’d like to change.

It’s overwhelming.

So naturally you want to do it all at once. Because:

How could you be content starting with the tiny change of, say, a three minute meditation habit when your house is a mess, you haven’t worked out in… a while AND you find that you actually don’t like your career?

Your life might look nothing like your ideal life, so naturally we can’t make changes fast enough.

I’ve been on the self-improvement track for four years now. In the beginning I used a sort of throw-and-see-what-sticks approach to change. I tried many different things and went between phases of action and phases of being up in my head trying to figure it all out.

Recently though I’ve had this realization: What if the only thing that matters is now? I didn’t realize it, but I had been living in the future a lot. Maybe because I thought in order to race to my future, I needed to keep my head there, too.

But where could those big plans be actualized? Only in the present. 

Let that one drop in for a moment: The only place your vision is going to be created is now, as in today.*

*Thanks, Captain Obvious.

That doesn’t have to be a mortifying thought at all.

It’s liberating: You actually don’t need to have a perfect plan to make your dreams real. You only need to know the step right in front of you, and I’ve found with my clients that people usually have a good gut feeling about what the simple next step needs to be.

This is day two  of the week long writing challenge.