It's the hardest to initiate
Seth Godin said, "The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate."
This rings true.
We react automatically everyday without really thinking about it. It comes from our human fight-or-flight programming. Our reactions are often about survival and ensuring our own physical (and in the modern-day world, psychological) safety. We can react to what people say, what people do, or any external circumstance.
Not all of our reactions are productive or warranted, and we learn how to respond instead - to stop, think, and plan what we are going to do or say in response to the external stimulus. Even though it is harder than simply reacting, we get to choose the response. In turn, we gain some responsibility and agency.
We hit a huge milestone when we can graduate from reacting to responding. It's not an easy task and requires constant maintenance and reflection. It can take most of a career to make this leap.
Then, there is the hardest milestone - to initiate.
If I think about the number of times I've wanted to initiate something versus the number of times I've actually initiated it in real life, those are two very different numbers.
I wonder, what makes it so hard for us to initiate, even as leaders and people with agency?
***
Three things immediately come to mind for me: loneliness, fear of failure, and lack of clarity.
It is lonely to walk the path of the leader because I have to do it first - all by myself. Nobody is there to step into the void before me to tell me it's OK. It can lead to becoming misunderstood and alienated by the eyes of the crowd. When I suddenly stand out, people can become (at best) skeptical and (at worst) judgmental about anyone who chooses differently. It can feel like I no longer belong or am wanted, especially if I decide to keep going forward.
Every time I decide to initiate something, I have to battle my fear of failure. The paradox is that I have no idea what I'm doing or if it's going to work, yet I want everything to work out perfectly! I have learned to accept failure as a definite possibility in order to push through the fear. If I don't learn to take responsibility for that failure, that fear will remain a safe excuse for me to not act.
I often have headaches about the question "so, how do I do it?" When I initiate, it is often something that doesn't exist yet. It only exists in my head, in my imagination. That makes initiating hard. I cannot go and find a manual or roadmap to follow. I'm literally the first one to do it. There is so much friction when there is such a lack of clarity in the "how."
***
When we find it hard to initiate, I can simply acknowledge that:
I will feel lonely, yet there is always someone out there who believes what I believe in. I just haven't met them yet. Initiating is actually one of the fastest ways to find those people,
I will be scared to fail, and accepting failure as an expectation and fact can alleviate that stress - enough to push me to keep going.
I will not know "how" to do it, and I can't be good at something if I've never done it before. Instead of focusing on the doubt of "I don't know how", I can focus on solving the problem of "finding out how."
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