Uninspired doing is a total waste of time. I know this. I’ve learned this the very slow, very hard, very long way.
What do you do, though, when all your action choices seem unpalatable and doing nothing doesn’t feel right either?
For example, over the last couple months, I’ve known that doing nothing about my financial situation didn’t feel good at all. Tim feels fine about that. He’s so sure money will flow to us that he could spend his days watching the clouds float by and be as happy as a dog running on the beach.
Me? Nope. I don’t have the knowing that he has.
My path of least resistance is to do SOMETHING that could lead to an income for us. Tim’s okay with that too. (He’s pretty darn good at getting easy.)
So for a month, I bid on a bunch of freelance projects. HATED it. Did it anyway. Never landed a single job. No wonder. My alignment sucked.
I batted about a bunch of ideas. None felt all that good.
I finally landed on the idea of revamping my novel writing e-book package and sales page and promoting it. This idea felt a little better. Not great, mind you. But better.
It felt good enough to start moving forward with it.
Now, of course, my first choice is to write a novel. Or better yet enjoy Tim’s lottery winnings and just focus on blogging.
I deliberately walked away from internet marketing two years ago; I never thought I’d be doing it again. It’s not something I feel that great about.
But between that and working for pennies to write articles on subjects I have no interest in, the e-book marketing won out. And so I moved forward. I wasn’t having a good time.
Thoughts about the project kept pushing good thoughts out of my head. I noticed that instead of thinking about our house on ocean view acreage in Oregon, I was thinking about sales conversion rates and search engine optimization and website stats. Not good. I hate that stuff.
So I stopped. And I asked, how could I make this project more interesting and fun?
It took a few days, but I came up with the idea of creating a series of audios to go with the e-book package. Writing the audio scripts and recording them sounds like fun.
So NOW I feel good about what I’m doing.
Within this story I just told, do you see the two choices you have when an action you think you must take doesn’t appeal to you?
Kenny Rogers sings, in The Gambler, “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” He was singing about cards, but it applies to action journeys too.
Fold ‘Em
If the action you’re taking feels truly lousy and you hate every minute of it, STOP. Fold ‘em. Walk away.
Sometimes, you may walk away and never go back. As with my freelance job search, you may find that once you turn away from the resistance you were creating by trying to do something you hated, you attract another opportunity to replace what you didn’t want to do. Or, as with my e-book revamp, you see something that was there already in a totally different way. You don’t have access to great ideas from a place of resistance and “I hate this.”
Sometimes, when you walk away for just awhile, your energy shifts enough to go back and do the “hated” task with a different attitude. By walking away, you get access to a better feeling place that then attracts a more relaxed way of facing the task.
Abraham-Hicks says, “If there is something that you have to do, resist the temptation to do it under duress. Ask yourself, ‘What’s the worst thing that would happen if I didn’t do this?’ And if you can get away with not doing it at all, don’t do it. And then imagine what would it feel like to have this done. Spend a day or two, if you can, just 15 minutes here, 5 minutes here, 2 minutes here, here and here, imagining it completed in a way that pleases you! And then, the next time you decide that you’re going to take action about it, the action is going to be a whole lot easier.”
Hold ‘Em
When a poker player holds a hand, what is he focused on? The cards in the hand that do him no good? No. He’s focused on what he thinks could be the winning cards. He’s focused on the pair or the full house or the straight. The cards in his hand that don’t make up the potential win are unimportant to him.
This is how you must look at a task that you’re going to go ahead and do. Find what’s good about it.
This is what I did with my e-book marketing action. I looked for, and thanks to law of attraction, found something about it that appealed to me. And now, when I think about it, I focus on the fun aspects and refuse to give thought to the aspects I’m not crazy about.
There’s always a way to take action that feels good.
Abraham-Hicks once offered the example of a woman whose husband is in the hospital dying. She’s been at his side for days and days. She’s exhausted and sad and scared. She understands her energy though, and she knows she needs to find reasons to feel good if she’s to help her husband at all. He doesn’t “believe in” this vibrational stuff so he’s feeling sorry for himself and he’s depressed and scared.
This woman wants to stay away from the hospital. She wants a day to do something that feels good. But if she does that, the guilt will ruin any “feel good” she might find.
If she goes the hospital, she knows she’ll feel resentful and angry and she’ll get sucked into her husband’s negativity.
Which is her path of least resistance? She can’t fold ‘em because she’s not willing to walk away from her husband.
Abraham-Hicks suggested that she go to the hospital for just a couple hours. They suggested that she find something that makes her feel good to share with her husband (a book or magazine or whatever) and when she feels like she really needs to leave, she tells her husband how much she loves him and she leaves to enjoy the rest of her day.
It’s like that bit of sunshine peeking through the wee hole. When you can’t comfortably give up on some action, you find an aspect of it that feels good and hold on to that aspect the way a gambler would hold onto a royal flush. You, “Clean It Up.”
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My mother keeps many of her memories in a cedar chest at the end of her bed. The trunk holds awards and clippings—I think she saved every newspaper column I ever wrote, and she has at least five copies of the first whole newspaper in which my first column appears. The chest holds locks of hair and photographs and playbills. And it holds some of my early artistic and literary efforts.
