Daryl Wood's Blog

“It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.” Robert Service

This tells me it’s not the goal I am pursuing that is overwhelming for me – indeed, that’s what I focus on and keep reaching for. What slows me down and depletes me is the daily, over and over again, little things that I keep tripping over or bumping up against.

When we have unfinished business, we have a grain of sand in our shoe. We may not notice it all the time and we might not even realize how something is either holding us back or getting in our way. Eventually, something happens to make us realize that there is a nagging, annoying and frustrating “something” that keeps us stuck. Lately, that “something” seems to be my office. Try as I might, I keep adding more papers.

As I wrote the above paragraphs I had stopped to look around my office. I was moved. I got up, picked up one pile that had been set aside for filing … and I did it. Then I went to another spot and put away that pile. Before long I had cleared some open space on my credenza. I felt good, refreshed and more open to what was ahead of me.

Amazing how even pulling thoughts together can create the momentum to take action. And basically, that’s all there is to it. So what it is that makes us procrastinate on the little things that can feel so irritatingly absurd? That’s a question we each need to ask ourselves. For some of us, we don’t see the value in the work waiting to be done or we are overwhelmed with how much we have to do. The bottom line is that when we make up a story we get attached to it and we end up with grains of sand that feel like mountains!