All Your Great Evidence is Behind You

Or “What I learned about success while shoveling my walkway.”

An insight like this might sound silly but, when I got it – in the hush of a rural Nova Scotia night with the snow still falling softly – it was actually kinda profound.

First of all, shoveling is far from my favorite thing to do. And here in Atlantic Canada freshly fallen snow turns quickly into a wet, heavy cement-like substance that doesn’t want to come off the shovel when you go to hurl it to one side of the path.

To say that I had many moments when I wanted to quit is rather an understatement.

But in the end, I finished it and felt the lovely puff of pride when my husband (bless his heart) stopped in the front doorway to admire the fine job I did. (He KNOWS he’ll never get help with it again if he nitpicks….smart man!)

And the reason I finished boiled down to 3 things, which I realized apply to just about everything else we might want to quit, so here they are:

1.  Doing it faster to “just get it over with” only made it worse.

I kept getting exhausted by the sheer volume and weight of the snow and it was definitely making me grumble more about the whole thing. It was when I slowed down to a more enjoyable and sustainable pace that I noticed the hush of the night and the beauty around me and got just a little more grateful to be outside after all.

2. As long as I’m committed to finishing, taking a rest is OK.

And I took lots of them. And at first, when I was grumbling, every rest I took I thought might become my stopping place. And when we don’t want to do what we’re doing, it’s so easy to label any true need for a break as avoidance, resistance or procrastination.

In fact, we can get afraid to stop just for fear that we’ll never start again. But then, at some point, I fully committed to getting it finished, all the way up the steps. And after that, a rest was just a rest. And it was good!

3. When I wasn’t sure I could do it, I would turn around and see how much of it I had done already.

And it surprised me what a great motivational boost this was, but even when I first started and there was WAY more yet to do than what I had completed, every time I looked at the finished bit, I felt great.

And once I figured this out, I just kept looking back at the ever increasing amount of evidence that I could do it and just kept on doing it and pretty soon…it was DONE!

And then I thought how curious it is that, when we get so focused on “moving forward” with something hard, it seems counter-intuitive to look back.

Yet,  all the evidence for how far we’ve come, even if it’s just a tiny increment, is behind us.

In writing this, I remembered a friend who doesn’t write to do lists, she writes DONE lists. Now I can see why!

So the new “prescription” I’m going to be playing with this year is:

Slow down
Rest when needed
Be inspired by what’s already done

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Where do YOU draw your inspiration from when you want to quit?

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