75| Stop Waiting to Feel Ready – Why Waiting For the Feeling is Keeping You Stuck

 What if the reason you're still stuck isn't because you're not ready, but because you're waiting for a feeling but what if ready isn't something you feel at all, what if it's something you simply decide?

Have you ever wondered why some people can take a leap of faith without flinching while you need ten assurances of safety just to take one small step? 

Transcript

 What if the reason you're still stuck isn't because you're not ready, but because you're waiting for a feeling but what if ready isn't something you feel at all, what if it's something you simply decide?

Have you ever wondered why some people can take a leap of faith without flinching while you need ten assurances of safety just to take one small step? Let’s chat moreas this podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

Hey friends, welcome as always whether you’re a frequent flier or just caught sight of us and decided to join in and see what’s going on. I'm so glad you're here, wherever you're tuning in from, whether you're multitasking or taking some few minute just for yourself which we always talk about being so important. However you’re listening thank yourself for giving yourself some self care today and if someone sent this to you, then thank them and enjoy the thought that someone was thinking of you today. 

There's a quote I heard on someone else’s podcast a couple months ago and the quote is from Rich Roll, who’s an ultra endurance athlete and podcast host, and what he said was that mood follows action. That’s it, so simple but it got me thinking about how so many of us are waiting for the mood first, for feeling like starting something but maybe we have it backwards. It got me thinking that most of us live our lives believing the opposite is true. We believe we need to feel ready before we act. We believe motivation has to show up first, before we're allowed to start the project, make the call for a hard conversation, or to end the relationship that just isn’t working anymore, to start the workout routine, whatever it is we've been circling around and avoiding.

But what he’s actually pointing to, and what shows up again and again in behavioral psychology, is that it actually works the other way around more often than we think. Action comes first. The feeling, the motivation, the sense of readiness, that tends to follow once we've already started moving, even if it’s just a step or two toward what we’re waiting for. 

So here's a question I wonder about and it's one I really don't have a perfect answer to. Why is it that some people can take a leap of faith without any hesitation or maybe just hesitate a little, while others need a running start, a safety net, a hundred reassurances before they'll even consider stepping off the ledge. Where does that difference come from. And if you're someone who needs more comfort and certainty and safety before you act, how do you build the courage to move anyway?

I want to take a moment here for our first reflection. Just think about the last time you wanted to change something in your life or maybe there’s something right now. Maybe it was an unhealthy habit, a toxic relationship, a job that no longer challenges you or just depletes you. Were you the person who jumped first and figured it out as you went, or were you the person who needed to feel ready before you'd even consider taking the first step. There's no right or wrong answer here. I just want you to notice your own pattern, because that pattern is the thing we're going to work with today and chat a bit more about. Maybe you want to find the courage without the safety to take the leap, or maybe you leap without ever thinking and you want to slow things down bit.

Let's talk about where this difference comes from, because it's not a character flaw if you're someone who needs more safety before you move. A lot of it traces back to how we learned to handle uncertainty earlier in life from our environments. If you grew up in an environment where mistakes were met with criticism or where unpredictability felt dangerous, your nervous system learned that caution keeps you safe. That's not weakness, that’s just your nervous system learning that it had to adapt to whatever was around you. Meanwhile, someone who grew up with more stability, more permission to fail and try again, often develops a higher tolerance for the discomfort of not knowing how things will turn out. Neither path is better. They're just different starting points, and the beautiful thing is that starting point is just that, a starting point and doesn't have to be where you end up, that’s your choice and up to you.

This is where I want to bring in some research that’s really helpful. There's a well known and well studied approach called behavioral activation, and it was originally developed to help people work through depression, apathy, and low mood. The core idea is really simple. Instead of waiting to feel motivated before doing something, you do the small thing first, on purpose, on a schedule, regardless of how you feel in that moment. And what researchers found, in study after study, is that this approach works about as well as some forms of more complex talk therapy, and in several trials it performed just as well as medication for many people dealing with depression. Let’s think about that for a bit. Taking a small, scheduled action, even when you don't feel like it, even when everything in your body says no, can shift your internal state almost as powerfully as other established treatments. Now let me be clear that I’m in no way telling you to stop taking medications you’ve been prescribed but if you’re interested then maybe just think about having a conversation about this with your doctor if you choose. And for those not on medications, this is just information to help you understand that you may have what you need already take action that will change your mood.

The mechanism behind it is something psychologists call the reward and avoidance cycle. When we're stuck, anxious, or low, we tend to withdraw from the very activities that would normally bring us a sense of accomplishment or connection. That withdrawal feels like it’s protecting us at the time, but it actually deepens whatever stuck feeling we're trying to escape. Behavioral activation interrupts that loop, not by asking you to think differently, but by asking you to act differently first, in tiny, manageable ways like we’re always talking about, and trusting that the feeling will catch up.

A researcher named Albert Bandura who we’ve mentioned in prior episodes, spent decades studying something called self efficacy, which is basically our belief in our own ability to carry out an action and produce a result. What his research consistently showed is that confidence doesn't usually come before competence. It comes after small, repeated experiences of doing the thing, even imperfectly. Each small action becomes evidence that you can do the thing. And that evidence builds the very confidence that we mistakenly think we need to have before we start.

I want you to pause again here for a second reflection. Think of one small thing you've been putting off because you don't feel ready. Not the giant scary thing, just one small piece of it. What would it look like to do that one small piece today, not because you suddenly feel inspired by my podcast which hey if you are, I’m really appreciative of that, but simply because you decided to. You don't have to act on it yet but just notice what comes up when you imagine doing it. So for example, if you’re thinking of changing jobs, could one small piece or action be to look at what is needed for the other job you may be thinking of.

Now let's talk about whether learning about the change actually helps you change. Because a lot of us, myself fully included, can spend an enormous amount of time and energy reading books about the thing we want to change, listening to podcasts about it, this one included right? Or watching videos, visualizing the outcome we want, and somehow still never actually do the thing. And that's not laziness, it's more like a trick our brains play on us. Learning about change can feel almost identical to making change, because it activates similar feelings of progress and purpose. You feel productive. You feel like you're moving forward. But consuming information about a change is not the same as the muscle memory of actually doing it.

Again that doesn't mean learning is useless. Visualization especially has real value, especially in sports psychology, where athletes use mental rehearsal to prepare their nervous system for an action before performing it. But visualization works best as a companion to action, not a replacement for it. If you visualize the run but never put your shoes on, you've trained your imagination, not your body. The same is true emotionally. If you read ten books about setting boundaries but never actually say the sentence out loud to the person in your life or actually put it into action, you've trained your understanding, not your courage for change.

So here's where I land, and I want to be honest that this is part research and part lived experience. I think learning, listening, and visualizing are wonderful tools for reducing the size of the leap so maybe it doesn’t feel so big and scary. They help you understand the terrain. But at some point, and usually sooner than we think, the next right step is simply to take one small physical action, even one that doesn't feel ready, because that action is the only thing that actually changes your internal state. Thinking can prepare you. Only doing can transform you.

This connects to something Viktor Frankl wrote, which I kind of come back to often to his quotes on this show. He said that when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. I'd gently add to that, that sometimes we are entirely able to change the situation, we're just waiting for permission, or a feeling that may never arrive on its own. The action has to come first. The feeling of readiness is often the result, not the requirement.

Let's take another pause here, because if you're someone who needs more comfort and safety before taking a leap, I don't want you to hear this episode as a call to suddenly become reckless or to shame yourself for needing more steps along the way. That's wouldn’t be self care, that's self pressure and that’s not what we’re about here. Instead, I want you to ask yourself what is the smallest possible version of this action that you could take today. Not the leap. Just the first inch of the leap, a little toe forward. Maybe it's writing one sentence instead of the whole letter. Maybe it's looking up one class instead of signing up for the program. Maybe it's putting on your walking shoes and standing at the door, without committing to the whole walk yet. Mood follows action, but action doesn't have to be dramatic to count.

This is also where self compassion fits into everything we talk about on this show. Needing more safety before you leap isn't a flaw to fix, it's information about how you're wired, and you can work with that wiring instead of fighting it. You can build little toe dips instead of demanding a cliff dive from yourself. The goal isn't to become someone who never needs comfort. The goal is to stop confusing comfort with readiness, because if you wait for true, complete readiness, you might be waiting your whole life for a feeling that was always going to arrive after you started, not before.

There's one more piece I want to add to all of this, because I think it might be important reframe here. We tend to treat readiness like it's a feeling that is supposed to arrive so we sit around waiting for that internal green light, that unmistakable sense of calm certainty, before we'll let ourselves move. But ready isn't a feeling at all, ready is a actually decision.

Think about that distinction for a second, because it changes everything. A feeling is something that happens to you. It shows up uninvited, it fades on its own timeline, and you don't have much control over when it appears. A decision is something you make, it’s something you intentionally choose. You don't wait for permission from your nervous system to make a decision. You simply choose it, and then your actions follow from that choice, not from whatever emotional weather happens to be passing through that day.

So much of what we call not being ready is really just us waiting for a feeling that was never going to show up first. We're standing at the door checking the sky for the perfect weather before we'll step outside, but the truth is, the weather changes once you're already walking. You don't need the calm certainty to arrive before you start. You need to decide that today is the day you're going to act as if you're ready, regardless of what your body is saying to you in that moment. And I know it can be hard and it can be scary. But even if you find it doesn’t work the way you visualized or not the way you intended, it’s not a failure. Another common theme here is if you can take whatever situation, easy/hard, positive or negative and learn from it, find the information in it, take the parts and make changes to the next big leap, then that is still success, because you’ve learned. A little bit about yourself and about what works and what didn’t.

I want you to pause here for one more reflection. Think about the thing you've been waiting to feel ready for, the one we talked about earlier. Now ask yourself honestly, am I actually waiting for more information, more skill, more resources. Or am I just waiting for a feeling. If it's the feeling, I want you to consider something a little uncomfortable. What if you simply decided, right now, that you are ready. Not because your stomach stopped doing nervous flips, not because the fear disappeared, but because you made a choice to call yourself ready and to act from that choice anyway.

This is where the mood follows action and the ready is a decision become the same idea wearing two different hats. The leap doesn't require the feeling of readiness to show up first. It requires you to decide you're ready, take the small action, and then let the feeling of readiness build behind you, the way confidence is built behind every small step we talked about earlier with self efficacy. You're not lying to yourself when you decide you're ready before you feel it. You're simply refusing to hand the steering wheel over to a feeling that may not have any truth behind it and even if it does have truth behind it, you will learn as you navigate your ride.

So to bring it back to where we started, mood follows action. Confidence follows competence. Readiness follows the first small step, not the other way around. The people who seem to leap fearlessly aren't necessarily braver than you. They've often just had more practice collecting evidence that action leads somewhere survivable, even good. And you can start collecting that same evidence, one small inch at a time, starting today if you want to. And as we mentioned earlier, if you’re one of those people that leaps and leaps without thinking again, I would challenge you to reflect and find your why, what can you learn from it. And then will it no longer feel reckless but maybe feel more purposeful as to why you keep leaping.

Before we close out, this week, I want you to pick one thing you've been waiting to feel ready for. Just one. And instead of waiting, I want you to take the smallest possible action toward it within the next day, the next twenty four hours, regardless of how you feel when the moment comes. Not the whole thing. Just the first inch. And then notice, even just a little, whether your mood shifted after you moved, even if you felt scared and nervous, take from that learn from that and see if your mood shifted after, rather than before.

And maybe share your leap of faith with someone because there's something powerful about realizing you're not the only one standing at the edge of your own doorway. And if today's episode resonated with you, please share this with someone who you can see has been stuck waiting to feel ready for something, that they don't need a big gesture. Just send the episode link with a short note that says, I thought of you when I heard this. That one small action might be exactly the inch someone else needed today or at the very least it sends a message that you’re thinking of them.

As always, if you're enjoying this podcast, subscribe and leavr a quick review genuinely helps more people find their way here, and it helps this little show keep growing and sharing more small dose self care. Thank you for being here today, thank yourself for taking that leap, and if you’re not ready for the leap then thank yourself for just considering it, for moving just a bit forward, little by little, peace by peace.