How taking imperfect action reduces your overwhelm
A guest post from Jenna Folarin
Hello everyone!
You’re in for a treat this week with a guest post from
over at The Motherhood Connection. She’s on a mission to help mothers ease overwhelm, cultivate self-compassion, and cultivate lives they love.As you can see, we have a lot of overlap in our work, so I am so excited to be featuring her post.
This week, she writes about taking imperfect action, something a lot of high achieving people struggle with (*raises hand*).
I hope you enjoy!
-Jillian
Taking imperfect action has become my permission slip.
You see, for years and years, I knew that I wanted to make big changes in my life, but I never got past the planning stage. Staying in the planning stage can feel like you are taking action, but, when it goes on for too long, it becomes like a comfort blanket and the planning part stays just that: a plan. It’s the action part that is missing.
What stops us taking action on our goals and dreams?
You would think that it’d be easy to take action on something that you’d love to do or that you are excited for. So, why isn’t it? Why does it feel so hard? What is holding us back?
Maybe you’re worried that:
if you do take action, it might not be good enough
you might fail or get it wrong
you might be judged by others
people might say ‘who do they think they are’
you just aren’t ready, and you don’t know enough
These worries may literally stop us in our tracks. We can go from feeling really excited to try something new and work on our goals and dreams, to feeling totally overwhelmed because of these imaginary scenarios in our head.
Or maybe the plan feels overwhelming. You might have researched and planned for your goal and dream so much that when you look at the plan, you don’t know where to start. It may all feel like too much.
So, how can we deal with this overwhelm so that we actually do take action on our goals and dreams?
By taking imperfect action.
What do I mean by this?
Give yourself the permission to take action in any way that you can, no matter how small - even if you don’t feel ready, even if you are not sure it’ll work, even if you feel like you are winging it.
Taking any kind of action is better than none at all.
Each imperfect action that you take brings you one step closer to achieving your goals and dreams.
How do I know this works?
Well, for years and years I was that person who’d make elaborate plans of how I’d achieve my goals, but I didn’t actually take action. I was a perfectionist and was so worried of failure and judgement of others that it kept me stuck feeling unfulfilled and frustrated,
So what changed?
In short, motherhood broke me down and built me back up again. During the messy phase of recovery, I realized that if I stood any chance of feeling like myself again, I had to focus on doing things I loved.
One of those things was setting up a monthly self-care group for mums in my local area to facilitate open and honest conversations about maternal mental health.
I talked and talked about my plans to my husband. One day, he just said, ‘Well, what have you got to lose, why don’t you do it?’
This actually stopped me in my tracks because I was so used to not taking action that the thought of taking action was kind of strange!
So, I said “Well, nothing I guess…”
And that was it.
I took a small step, then another and another. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of 20 mums in a church hall telling them about my mental health journey as a mum, guiding a meditation and talking about self-care.
And guess what?
I absolutely loved every minute of it. So much so that I ran 6 more of these self-care meet ups and decided to retrain as a Coach because I wanted to be able to run events like these and support the mums professionally.
But if I hadn't taken that first step, I would never have known this.
If I hadn’t jumped into the deep end and trusted myself, I would have stayed in the planning stage. I would have been wishing that I could do something about my goals and dreams, but just not feeling able to.
The main thing I realized from running those meet ups and taking that imperfect action was that it’s the action that comes first and confidence comes later.
The more action you take, the more confident you become. Action first, confidence later.
By actually doing the thing, you’ll find that a lot of your careful planning goes out of the window anyway because things come up that weren’t in your plan.
But guess what? You’ll work it out and you’ll be building your resilience at the same time.
So, if taking action on your goals and dreams feels totally overwhelming to you right now, give yourself the permission slip of taking imperfect action and see what happens.
****
About Jenna:
Jenna Folarin is a Coach for Mums. She supports exhausted mums with young kids to turn their overwhelm and anger into calm and compassion. Jenna loves writing all about motherhood over on her Substack – The Motherhood Connection -
In November, Jenna is running The Autumn Sanctuary, 4 weeks of cozy online gatherings for mums to reflect, dream and connect, all while sinking into the seasonal energy of Autumn. If you’d like to join, you can find all of the info here: https://jennafolarin.co.uk/the-autumn-sanctuary/
Jenna lives by the sea in South Wales, UK with her husband and 3 children and once her kids are finally asleep, she loves reading romance books or crocheting a huge colorful blanket.
You can find out more about Jenna here:
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Wow did this land! Thank you Jill and Jenna! 🫶🫶
I never realised it until reading this but writing has done that for me. For some reason with writing I've been fine with "imperfect action", Ive been fine with sending stuff out in the world that I wasn't 100% ok with, especially on Medium where I didn't know anyone. It allowed me to play around and be imperfect and I learned that things turned out ok anyway. Writing has really been therapeutic in that way 🤔. Thanks for that insight!