Fly the Plane While You're Building It
Fly the Plane While You're Building It
It won't fall apart mid-air (with a little luck, anyway)
There are many good reasons to get tied up in knots in this world. I’m not even going to name them because you well know what they are. And to name things is to bring them into consciousness. We don’t need that.
But there are things that are not worth getting tied up in knots over, too. And those that I’m concerned with today have to do with taking action around a creative or business project. Maybe you have a story you want to write, or a memoir you’d like to start. Or perhaps you have a WIP (work in progress) that you want to move forward.
I have a bit of advice for you borne of my own at times difficult experiences accomplishing things. (Spoiler alert: there’s a hint in the title of this post.) I’m an Enneagram Nine and I can get ridiculously paralyzed by overwhelm. It’s one of my worst traits, and it is so innocuous that for years I didn’t realize what was happening. I get overwhelmed in relationship to projects, particularly writing projects. But because I self publish, it can also be around marketing. When overwhelm happens to me, it’s as if a soft, white cloud has settled over me. I look for a way out and I cannot find one.
Beginnings are exciting and also daunting. Middles can be a muddle. And endings are great if you can get there. Which is, of course, the problem at hand: getting there. You may have an idea that gets shoved aside with the necessities of dealing with life over and over and thus feel as if you are constantly beginning again. For all the stages of a project it’s useful to have a pithy little quote to pull out of your pocket and dust off.
And that pithy quote is yes, you guessed it, fly the plane while you building it.
Years ago, when I was starting my book coaching business and beginning to teach writing workshops, I heard businesswoman Christine Kane say that very quote.
Fly the plane while you’re building it.
In other words, take action.
Don’t wait until everything is perfect, because perfect never happens.
Send out ships. Get your work out in the world.
Take action.
Recently I’ve run across writers wringing their hands, afraid to start writing their novels, or start a newsletter, or begin posting on social media. They are afraid they aren’t perfect, that something might have to change, that not all the moving parts are ready yet.
Here’s a news flash: those fears are probably true. It’s impossible to get everything functioning perfectly. So your fears will come true, but you’ll also survive them. Because you will realize that a dead link is not the end of the world. Neither is a scene that doesn’t quite work. You just need to take action to fix them.
Remember, self-confidence comes from taking action.
Here’s a helpful paradigm that can be used to galvanize you to action. I learned this from my coach:
Circumstance
Thought
Feeling
Reaction
Result
Let’s use creating a website as an example. That’s the circumstance. Your thought might be that you can’t publish it because it’s not perfect yet. That thought leads to a feeling of discouragement, that you’ll never be able to get it perfect. What is your reaction to this feeling? You quit working on the website. The result is no website.
But what if you looked at it in a more positive, action-taking spin? Same circumstance. A different thought could be, it’s not perfect but I’ll publish it just the same. That creates a feeling of empowerment. The reaction is to hit publish. And the result is you have a website. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty great all the same.
You took action and got that plane in the air while you were still building it.
Try finding one tiny little step you can take with a project you’re stalled on and see how it works.
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