In October 2020, I enrolled in a programme with Quebec-based practitioners, using the metaphor of stepping into a canoe and following my own life path. In the middle of that training, I felt the call to start writing my memoir, to share my experiences and all the life lessons I had drawn from them.

I had the material. I had the decades. I had the lessons.

What I did not have was the courage to begin.

Four years of valid excuses

I remember the reasons I gave myself. I was too tired. My French was too French for an English-speaking public, my English too English for the French. I had not read enough about memoir structure. I had read too much and was drowning in examples.

These reasons were all true. That is the problem with good excuses, they always contain a portion of truth.

But the truth behind the truth was that I was waiting for a permission I was never going to give myself. Permission to be imperfect before starting. Permission to write a first paragraph that would not be good.

What I understood about hesitation

The part of the brain that protects us from danger cannot distinguish between the unfamiliar that kills us and the unfamiliar that saves us. To the survival brain, both are equivalent: a threat is a threat. It hesitates, it freezes, it finds one more reason to wait.

In a world where the unfamiliar was often dangerous, this system saved us. In a modern world where the unfamiliar is almost always what we most need in order to move forward, that same system becomes our greatest obstacle.

You do not win this battle with more thinking. More thinking strengthens the hesitation. It gives the survival brain more data to weigh, more pros and cons to balance.

The Five Second Rule

Mel Robbins, in her work on productivity and behavioural change, describes something she calls the Five Second Rule. The moment you feel the impulse to act, you have about five seconds before your brain talks you out of it. So you count backwards. Five, four, three, two, one. On one, you move.

Not the perfect move. Any move.

I started this book that way. One paragraph, not very good. One week with no paragraphs. Another paragraph, slightly better. A chapter that made me wince. And now the article you are reading, which is among other things a small testament to the fact that the only way out of the hesitation was through it.

What this lesson taught me about transmission

I did not wait until I was ready to write this book. I started before I was ready, and the act of starting became the only readiness I was ever going to get.

This is Strawberry 8 of Volume 6 of The Strawberry Wisdom, The Courage to Act.

This week's question

What have you been waiting to start for too long, and what is the real reason behind your good excuses?

Write it in the comments. I read everything.

Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom