Permission to Feel Success

You have multiple important projects in life right now, each with their own seemingly limitless set of responsibilities.

When you sit down to work on one, all the other tasks you feel you should be doing come to mind, and then you start to reprioritize.

You find yourself at the end of the day with a quarter of what you expected to finish done and mounting anxiety on your shoulders.

That anxiety accumulates over time until you burn out feeling like you didn’t even get that much done.

This pattern will steal entire days and weeks from you.

Maybe even months.

A small, interesting way that people lose lots and lots of time is that before they begin to take on any responsibility or task, they don’t remove their feeling of obligation to do everything else in their life.

You try to start a responsibility, a task, a project, but in the back of your mind you’re thinking about the other 30 or 40 or a hundred or infinite things that you could or should be doing or feel responsible to do.

And then you never begin.

I know people with weeks, months spent in this loop.

A very small tool for removing this is simply calling it out before it happens.

Before you begin a task, write down or say to yourself:

For the next X amount of time, nothing else matters besides this project.

If I complete this thing and nothing else, I can be proud of myself.

I will have moved myself forward.

All you have to do is call out this thing that is hiding behind the scenes and preventing you from focusing.

Give yourself permission to feel success if you just complete this one task right now.

And then begin.