Bonus blog about feeling overwhelmed and focusing on moving forward, no matter how small the step is.  The Universe says someone needs this message today, so if it was you give the Universe a thank you.

I had some physical health related goals for myself related to working out, training for races, etc.  I’m nowhere close to where I wanted to be in relation to those goals.  The more I realized how far off I am the more I thought about how much I needed to do to catch up, which made me feel overwhelmed and paralyzed to the point that I stopped taking action toward my goals.  Eventually I snapped out of it, when I asked, “What’s the smallest step forward I can take?”  I took my initial lifting routine and significantly cut it down.  I took my running program and significantly cut it down.  Then, something interesting happened.  I wasn’t paralyzed anymore.  I allowed myself to focus on just moving forward, so I started to take action.  It may not be perfect, but taking steps forward is better than not moving.  I’m now taking more consistent action in the right direction.

Let’s connect this to work.  In our story, I described how the looming physical goals ended up leaving me overwhelmed and paralyzed.  Have you ever felt that way at work?  I had this exact experience at work this week. It is my job to enable and drive adoption of AI for our incredible market research community.  I’ve been reading and listening to leaders talk about AI and the ideal state, and it just hit me hard for some reason.  I saw the ideal state, and I saw how big and complicated the gap is to get there.  The gap is a tech gap, a culture gap, a workflow gap, a new habit gap, and more.  The questions of, “How do we close this gap fast enough?  How do we find a way to catch something moving so fast?” began swirling and I started to notice that overwhelm and paralysis was trying to set in.  Then I remembered, it’s not my job to be perfect.  It’s not my job to solve all problems in one day and miraculously get ahead of a massive shift that no one really knows where it is going.  It’s my job to find a way to help us all move forward in the right direction, even if those steps feel small.  It is my job to consistently keep us moving forward, because sooner or later those steps will add up.  Once I embraced that I need to keep taking steps forward, I could get more focused on identifying what those steps are and get moving again.

The challenge: If you are feeling paralyzed, will you remember you just need to move forward, even if the steps are small?

Bonus: Part of what helped me snap out of it on the work side was a friend who said something nice like, “You’re doing a pretty god job of keeping us moving.”  Sometimes an affirming word is all you need.

Peace,

Andrew Embry