Jitters

One of the things I do for a living is to help people get unstuck. In other words, I help people change unworkable patterns of behavior.

Of great puzzlement to me is the remarkable ability I have to continuously fall into the same traps of thought and action that I demonstrate for others how to escape. It would be fascinating if it were't so damn painful.

Check that- it is fascinating, even if painful. And that is what I want to explore in this blog, broadly. Change and the things that make change so difficult. I know a lot about my own experience of change, and over the course of my career, I've had the opportunity to view the change process of many other people. It's fascinating, wonderful, and maddening.

Starting this blog has been a wonderful case in point. I've had a desire to start a blog for some time. In fact, I made a decent effort about a year and a half ago (is it poor form to link to your own defunct blog?). For the last week, I've donked around with blogger and wordpress, played with templates and design, and read various how-to's. What I haven't done, until today, is written anything.

Why? I've been afraid, felt a lack of confidence, doubted that I'll ever have readers and worried that I will. Of course, I've questioned why on earth I would even want to do such a thing. So, the next step has been to undertake strategies to try to build confidence, assuage doubts and develop a safe, secure plan for developing a grade-A blog with lots of readers and positive feedback.

Well, I've looked high and low, and no plan exists. I can't seem to find my confidence, largely because I haven't accrued much confidence by actually blogging. The worry is still present, as are the doubts that this will ever really amount to much.

Yet somehow words are appearing on the screen in front of me. My fingers are moving acrossed the keyboard, so I can feel certain that the words on the screen are being put there by me. I am closer to my goal of having an engaging, informative blog than I was this morning, much closer than I was after a week of tweaking with font color.

I think there are a number of things in life that follow this some sort of trajectory: relationships, fatherhood, sports, work... I suppose nearly anything of value involves this same type of process. Anytime we step into the unknown, we don't really know what is going to happen. So the temptation is to not step.