James Lim explains why you're stuck: fear of failure, judgment, and decision paralysis. He breaks the fix into three moves: take responsibility, shrink tasks into micro-steps, and treat attempts as experiments instead of final verdicts.
Chapters
You've been sitting on an idea for months, maybe even years. Yet every time you think of starting, you somehow find an excuse not to. Why? It's probably because of the following. What if I fail? What will people think? What if I make the wrong decision? Where do I start? What if I'm not good enough? These thoughts will continuously spin in your head. And how do you respond? You keep researching, acquiring more and more knowledge, Taking courses, reading books, watching YouTube videos. You make elaborate plans that you never execute on. You distract yourself with shiny new ideas and projects. You catch yourself fantasizing about what success would look like, but you never act on it. Now, why do I mention all of this? It's because I've been there. And it's really painful to actually admit some of this. I think so much about all of this stuff, my head would hurt. Yet nothing ever came to life. On the outside, things look pretty fine. You know, I had a decent job, but inside I felt totally trapped. I had this internal conflict that just wouldn't leave me. And it, and it. And it went on for days, and it became months and then years. And I couldn't figure out exactly what it was like, why it was so, why it was so difficult to live with. When I realized it was a violation of my values. So, have you read these books up here? Now I've got a copy. I don't have them with me right here. What was going on here? I was really violating what I believed mattered most to me. That is being someone who takes action, who has a growth mindset. I mean, I had the book. Someone who was willing to try, someone who learns from failure. Yet in reality, and looking at my behaviors, I wasn't any of these things. And that really was quite upsetting. It felt like I was carrying this invisible weight. And at this point in this period of life, I try and blame anything. I blame my job, my schedule, even other people. It was pretty crazy, actually. Anything to avoid facing the truth. I always knew, though, it was pretty much all down to me. And that's the thing that I would have to go to bed with at night. So responsibility. This is really important. The problem was that nothing was changing in my life. Nothing would change unless I took responsibility. And the reality was this. This was pretty scary because I was the only one in control. And I didn't really know what was on the other side. But at this point, I'd gone around in so many circles, I just couldn't avoid it any longer. I had to face it. And an attempt to take responsibility of this. So how do you do that? This is all about confronting your reality. At this point, we need to totally strip away all of the excuses and be brutally honest with with ourselves. Are you avoiding real action by making yourself busy with other things going on in life? And if you're scared, you need to admit it. The reason is that we can work with this and we can figure out a way forward. If you continue to lie to yourself and make excuses, you end up not being able to solve the real problem at hand. What does this mean here? I noticed even when I eventually started to try and move it constantly felt like wading through some type of syrup. It was really heavy, it was really exhausting and incredibly slow. One harsh truth here is there's no escaping it. You will feel a lot of resistance and this is something I speak frequently to clients about. But this is a signal you're on the right path. What can you do when you're in this situation? You need to simplify your steps. What tiny actions can you do today? Now, this is not actually that trivial. It's a bit of a skill. What I tend to see is people will think there's a small step, but it's still too big. It's like trying to make the same progress. If you're wading through syrup, you would be turning your steps into these little micro steps, which sometimes is quite hard to compute. Shrink the stakes. Treat everything that you do like a mini experiment that you can run rather than looking for the result. You're really looking at running these little tests to see how you get on. Now, I actually had an experience like this when I was looking at posting on social media quite a few years ago. I was so scared of looking at the camera lens, I couldn't look at the red button, the red light. In fact, it got so bad I couldn't even look at the glass on the lens even when the camera was off. So I had to figure out a way to. And I would use my phone and have it running on a. On a phone holder while I'm driving. So I couldn't look at it. Just it was facing me. It wasn't even on, just so I could get used to having a camera there, because I essentially built this phobia up. And the last thing to mention here is tracking how you feel when you do follow through on your intention, because this is probably something quite new to you. It only takes one step today to really break this cycle. So that's all I wanted to cover today. And I'll see you in the next video.
