accountability clarity dream life dream life podcast four thousand weeks Kristina Karlsson Oliver Burkeman personal growth podcast procrastination start before you're ready taking action

#496 - Why Waiting to Feel Ready Costs You Years

 

Hi there!

What is the dream, project or change you keep telling yourself you will begin when you feel ready?

In this episode, I explore the quiet cost of waiting.

It can feel sensible to research, prepare and promise ourselves we will start when life settles down, but readiness rarely arrives before action. Clarity comes from moving.

Inspired by Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks, I share why the number of weeks in an average life is less frightening than it sounds and far more clarifying, and why having support around you matters so much when motivation fades.

I also share details of my free online workshop, Start Before You're Ready, on Tuesday 29 September at 7pm AEST. You can register here.

What could you start before you feel ready?

As always, I’d LOVE to hear what resonated most with you - so please share and let’s keep the conversation going in the Dream Life Podcast Facebook Group here.

Have a wonderful week ...and remember, it all starts with a dream.

Enjoy!

PS: If you would like support planning and following through alongside a group of inspiring women, explore Dream Life Coaching: https://www.yourdreamlifestartshere.com/course

SHOW NOTES:

RESOURCES:

TRANSCRIPT:

You are running out of time.

I know that's a strange way to start. Stay with me though, because I think this is the most freeing thing anyone ever told me. And I reckon it might be the thing that finally gets you moving on whatever you've been putting off.

Here's the number.

The average human life is about four thousand weeks.

That's it. Four thousand. If you live to eighty, that's roughly what you get.

I first came across that in Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks, and I had to put the book down for a bit.

Because four thousand doesn't sound like very many, does it. It sounds like a number you could count. Eighty years sounds enormous. Four thousand weeks sounds like something you could nearly fit in a spreadsheet.

If you're forty-five, you've spent about two thousand three hundred of them.

So you've got something like sixteen hundred left. Give or take.

Now I don't say that to frighten anyone. I say it because for me it did the opposite.

When I understood that, a lot of things I'd been deferring suddenly moved up the list. And a lot of things I'd been worrying about stopped mattering quite so much.

It's clarifying. That's the word. It makes you go, right. What am I actually doing here.

So let's do something.

Think of the thing you've been meaning to start.

You know the one. It came to you the second I said it. It always does.

Now. How long has it been sitting there?

A year? Three? Seven?

Whatever number came up, multiply it by fifty-two.

Three years is a hundred and fifty-six weeks. Seven years is three hundred and sixty-four. Out of four thousand.

That's what it's cost so far.

And I want to be really clear about something, because I don't want anyone feeling bad listening to this.

You didn't waste those weeks. You were working. You were raising people. You were showing up for everyone who needed you, week after week, and you were probably tired for most of them.

You spent them. Every single one. Just not on this.

I find the way we wait really interesting, because it never feels like waiting.

It feels sensible.

You don't ignore the thing. Quite the opposite. You think about it constantly. You read about it. You've got a folder somewhere. You've saved things. You've maybe done a course about it.

And then every time you get close to actually starting, this thought arrives:

I'm not quite ready yet.

And look at the reasons we give it. They're all good ones.

I should do a bit more research first. I want to do it properly. Once work settles down. Once the kids are older. I'll start in January, January's a better time to start.

Every one of those sounds responsible. That's the trap. Waiting doesn't feel like avoiding. It feels like preparing.

So nobody ever calls it what it is. Including us.

And this really gets me...

It's not the weeks that have gone. It's the version of you that didn't happen.

Because things you start don't stay small. They grow. The first year of anything is clumsy and slow and a bit embarrassing. The second year it starts to take shape. By the third year you're just someone who does this thing.

So when three years go by, you don't lose three years of effort. You lose the woman who'd be three years in by now. Past the clumsy part. For whom this would already be normal.

That's the real cost. And it never shows up anywhere, which is why we keep paying it.

Can I tell you about mine?

I started kikki.K when I was twenty-two. I'd come to Australia from Sweden. English was my second language. I had no retail experience, no business degree, and no money to speak of.

Every reason to wait was available to me. I could have picked any one of them and nobody would have blinked.

I wasn't ready. I want to be really clear about that, because people sometimes tell the story as if I was. I wasn't. I was frightened. I started anyway.

And it hasn't got easier, by the way. That's the other thing.

When I started the podcast I thought, who am I to do this. There are people who do this properly. I don't know how any of the equipment works. I'll start once I've learned a bit more about it.

We're coming up on five hundred episodes.

Not one of them came from feeling ready. They came from a day where I decided to just make the first one badly.

So why does this keep happening to all of us?

I think we've been taught the wrong order.

Get clear, then act. Work out what you want, make a plan, and once you're sure, begin.

It works the other way around.

Clarity comes from starting.

You find out what you want by moving.

By trying a small version of it. By seeing how it actually feels in your hands instead of how you imagined it would feel from across the room.

You can't think your way to certainty. It's not available from where you're sitting. It turns up afterwards. Usually much later than you'd like, and usually when you've half forgotten you were waiting for it.

So every week spent waiting to feel ready is a week spent waiting for something that was never coming on its own.

There's a letter I love about this.

In 1884 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. He was in his thirties. He'd failed at nearly everything he'd tried. He'd been painting about four years and selling basically nothing.

And he wrote:

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

And in the letter he goes further. He says the voice only gets silenced by doing the work.

Not by thinking about the work. Not by reading about it. Not by waiting for the voice to go away by itself, which it won't, because it never has for anybody.

What I love is that his voice was the ordinary one.

You can't do this. Who do you think you are. Other people do this properly.

Same voice you woke up with this morning. He didn't have a special version.

He just worked out that it isn't a verdict. It's a sign you care about the thing. And the only way anybody has ever shut it up is by starting.

Okay. Now the bit I really want to talk about, and the reason I'm recording this at all.

Let's say something lands today and you decide, right, I'm starting.

You probably will. You'll have a good week. You might even have a cracking fortnight.

And then a Tuesday comes along where someone's sick, or work goes sideways, or you're tired in that way that goes all the way down. And you don't do the thing that day.

Fine. Completely human.

Then you don't do it the next day either.

And three weeks later you notice, with that particular sinking feeling, that you've stopped again.

I want to say something about that moment, because most women I meet are carrying it around as evidence about themselves.

It isn't.

That moment has almost nothing to do with your discipline and almost everything to do with what was around you when the hard week arrived.

Motivation was never going to save you there. Motivation is weather. It turns up, it leaves, and it was certainly never going to carry you through October.

What decides it is whether anybody was there.

Have a think about the things in your life that actually stuck.

I'd put money on nearly all of them involving other people. A class you'd paid for where someone noticed if you didn't come. A friend who walked at six and would be standing on the corner whether you felt like it or not.

And now think about the ones that quietly fell away.

Mostly things you were doing on your own. Where the only person who knew you'd stopped was you.

People don't struggle because they don't know what to do.

You know what to do. Truly. You've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts, you could probably teach it.

People struggle because they're trying to change their lives alone.

And once you see that, a lot of years suddenly make sense.

Right. Picture next October for a second.

One version: the thing's still on the list. You've had a busy year, a good year in lots of ways, and somehow it didn't happen again. And when someone asks how you've been you say, oh, you know. Flat out.

The other version: you started. Badly, probably. Clumsy, definitely. You weren't ready and you did it anyway. And twelve months on you're a woman who's a year in.

Same you. Same fifty-two weeks. The only difference is whether you began, and whether anyone was standing next to you when it got hard.

So. Tuesday the twenty-ninth of September, seven o'clock in the evening, I'm running a free workshop online. One hour.

It's called Start Before You're Ready.

And it does what it says.

I'll ask you five questions. You'll write, by hand, on actual paper. There'll be silences that go on longer than feels comfortable, and that's deliberate, because that's where your answers live and most of us never sit still long enough to hear them.

By the end of the hour you'll have three dreams written down in your own handwriting, and one small thing you're doing within twenty-four hours.

Not next month. Before this time tomorrow.

You don't need a plan. You don't need to know how. And if you're sitting there thinking "I don't even know what I want" then please come, because that's the most common place to be and it's exactly what the hour is for.

It's free. It's recorded. And you won't be doing it on your own, which matters more than you'd think.

Link's in the show notes. I'd love you to be there.

I'll leave you with the four thousand.

Whatever your number was at the start of this. One year, three, seven. That's weeks you've already spent on it, and you spent them waiting.

You can't get those back. Nobody can. But you've still got the rest, and the rest is quite a lot, and none of it requires you to feel ready first.

Four thousand weeks. Give one of them to this.

Come and start with me on the twenty-ninth.

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