Starting Before You Are Ready

What would you start today if you stopped waiting to feel ready? Would you ask for that promotion? Start your new project? Take the leap toward a new path you have been striving for?

Starting something new can be challenging, even terrifying. We often limit our capabilities and our goals because we convince ourselves that we need to feel ready before we begin.

We wait until we have more experience, more knowledge, more money, more confidence, or just better timing. However, there are moments when waiting is important. But how often does waiting actually make us feel more ready?

Is readiness something we expect to feel before taking a risk? Or does it come after we have already taken it? Confidence can come from experience, but we can't gain experience with something we never allow ourselves to begin.

Waiting is comfortable. As long as an idea stays an idea, it can't be challenged and it cannot fail. We don't have to worry about how other people will respond or whether or not the outcome will look the way we imagined. We do not have to find out whether we are capable of trying something new.

I have experienced this myself throughout my life: fearing the judgement of others, worrying about outcomes that I couldn’t control, even questioning my own capabilities. Yet, I still took that first step. And yes, it was terrifying.

I wasn't suddenly more confident or more prepared. I didn't wake up one day and finally feel ready. In many cases, I just decided that being afraid wasn't enough of a reason not to try.

Some of those decisions worked out exactly how I hoped. Others didn't. There were opportunities and roles I wasn't chosen for, ideas that didn't go as planned, and moments when I questioned whether I had made the right decision at all.

But each experience gave me something I couldn't have gained while waiting. Take that first step.

But taking the first step doesn't always mean jumping in before you're prepared. Waiting can be necessary. We may need more information, more experience, financial stability, or simply time to understand what we actually want.

There is a difference between waiting because we are preparing and waiting because we are afraid. How do we know which one we are doing?

Preparation moves us closer to starting. Fear can keep moving the starting line. We tell ourselves after one more class, after I save a little more, after I have more experience, when work slows down, when life feels more stable. There can always be another reason to wait.

We can see our peers, our friends, and our idols succeeding, but we don’t see the first steps it took for them to get there. We let the visual goal lines of others impact our ability to start.

We compare our first step to someone else's years of experience. We see the promotion, the business, the degree, the finished project, but rarely every step that came before it.

The path to the finish line is rarely linear. We may have to change direction, take steps backwards, make decisions that don't work out, and at moments discover that the finish line we were working toward isn't where we want to end up at all.

However, those moments give us strength, give us knowledge, and allow us to think critically about how to navigate the next course.

I could sit and write that I have succeeded throughout my life. That I haven't faced challenges, failures, skepticism, or moments of honestly questioning, “Am I capable?”

No. I write this as I am nervous to press publish and nervous about how others may respond. Yet, this first step has brought me my own joy and excitement. A feeling I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t taken that step.

Sharing our first steps is just as important as sharing our finish lines. We can be consumed by the final result: the promotion, the new business, the accomplishment, the success. What we don't always see is the uncertainty and hesitation that came before it.

Sharing those moments doesn't take away from our success. It actually gives someone else the opportunity to see that we didn't always know what we were doing either. That we questioned ourselves, changed direction, made mistakes, and started anyway.

Our willingness to share where we started may give someone else the courage to start too. And that benefits us all.

How did you decide it was time to take the first step?