Do hard things that scare you

My son Jayden, doing things that scare him.

I’ve been doing this 30 days of blogging challenge for 9 days now and I’m finding it difficult. I love writing 140 characters and hitting the tweet button. It feels so easy. It’s much harder for me to blog and write 140 words or more each day. Frankly, I’ve been scared of writing and yet at the same time have been wanting to get better at it.

The blogging challenge has been a great way for me to do something I currently consider hard and make it something that eventually turns into a habit. I might not blog every day after the challenge but I’ll be writing a lot more than before. Here’s what I often say to other people when they tell me something is hard, especially something they’ve never done before:

It seems hard only because you haven’t done it yet.

That means you’re probably just scared of it, like a fear of the unknown. At first it’s common for you to feel like you are looking from the bottom of a mountain at the top which is hidden in the clouds. It’s only when you figure out the steps and milestones you need to achieve on your way up that you stop being scared of the journey ahead and just get started.

If you are stuck on how get started and don’t have a friend like Om to challenge you, here are a few ideas and ways to learn what’s best for you:

  • Read Josh Kaufman’s book, The First 20 Hours to learn his system of learning things fast in a systematic way.
  • Join a session of BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits® program. It’ll change the way you think about changing your own behavior and forming new habits.
  • Have someone help you stay accountable. Break your ultimate goal into smaller steps, ideally daily milestones and then email someone who cares about you the steps with a commitment to email them daily about your progress.
  • If you prefer to keep things private, create a Google form with appropriate form fields where you enter your updates and then add a daily item to your calendar with a reminder to fill out the form. It’ll help you stay accountable to yourself.

I’m always learning new ways to get started with things I think are hard. If you’ve got ways that have worked for you, I’d love for you to share them in the comments below.