Recently a friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that there is not much in the way of social groups where he lived. Not one to take “can’t” for an answer I used some Clean Language questioning to explore that “can’t”. It turned out that there was in fact at least one group but because he had no idea what they did, had done nothing about it.
Now of course it’s easy for me, as an outside observer, to help my friend discover the problem and allow him to come up with a solution (phone them up and ask!), but I know we all have things in our lives that we want to do but don’t purely because we don’t know what’s involved.
“Hypnosis in Gravesend”
I’d always wanted to learn hypnosis but had never done anything about it because I’d no idea what was involved. One day I just happened to be in the right frame of mind and I casually Googled hypnosis training in Gravesend and guess what: There was a course running not far away and at a price and time I could afford. It didn’t take much thinking to sign up after that.
Fear holds us back from so many things, but so seldom do we realize that the “fear” is not in the doing or becoming whatever it is: it is the fear of the unknown process of getting there!
Think of something that you really want to do but haven’t. Get a new job? Go on a trans-European holiday? Learn a new language?
Now ask yourself what is it that is holding you back from that and what you would like to have happen.
Could it be that you don’t know what is available, how to organize it, where to go that is the problem? In other words; could be the mystery, the lack of knowledge, which is what you’re afraid of? It’s not the holiday or the job or the language that is scary is it, so it must be the organising of the holiday, the “finding” of the job and the fact that you don’t even know if there is somewhere nearby that even teaches languages.
Diminish the power of the unknown with knowledge
This year, why not choose one of those things that you always promise yourself you’d do and rather than promise yourself that you’ll do it, simply find out what is involved. Choose a starting point and go from there. I bet you’ll find it’s not as difficult as you imagine.
So I used to write the occasional to-do list to keep track of what I should be doing of a day, but recently I’ve started to get involved in a lot of different projects and its time to learn how to manage my tasks more efficiently and reliably.
Having recently attended JP Morgan’s awesome talk on fearlessness and how to live outside of your comfort zone, one the most interesting things was the concept that in procrastination hides fear. As an extension of that I discovered that I procrastinate about writing to-do lists and completing the items on it (if writing a new blog post wasn’t on my to-do list, I could even argue that writing this very post was a way of avoiding my to-do list 
).
So this post is a short piece summarising some of my research into how to write a good to-do list that you can manage and complete.
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