“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting the rest of our lives”

~Daniel Handler

I’m a procrastinator. There I said it. I’ve said it before but with all of the “e-clutter” in our lives I’m sure that by now you have forgotten that I shared this vital piece of information about little ole’ me. Procrastination is a nasty little habit that can grow into a huge monster waiting to gobble up precious time and life-altering moments.

I want you to think (and be honest with yourself), is there anything that you know for a fact you have been avoiding to start or finish?

I announced at the end of last year that I would finally be writing my first book, a spiritual one associated with my Breaking Bread With Natasha blog that I’ve been curating since 2009. I avoided starting the process for two years, ignoring the requests from my readers to “write a book Natasha“.

Right before I made my year-end announcement I was hit with some personal life craziness, and then weeks later I found my 2017 blindsided by the unthinkable (well at least for me), and my book and pretty much anything that didn’t have something to do with my survival, was placed on the back burner–temporarily. The crazy thing is I couldn’t avoid it. This book is staring in my face and people are frequently asking me “how’s the book coming along?”

Darn those public announcements! I knew that it was important to announce this huge step publicly, because if I didn’t then who would hold me accountable and when would I ever write and publish this book that people say they really want and need? The answer is “no one” and “probably never”. So two weeks ago I made the decision to push past my personal life “junk” and jump back into this book that I started working on last August, picked back up last December, and tried my best to ignore ever since.

There’s never a “perfect” time to do anything. When are we ever truly “ready” to become a parent? You can’t go based on other people’s experiences, you have to find out for yourself. No one knows what they are up against until that baby enters their life.

The same is true in business. For every entrepreneur out there grinding, hustling, and slaving away to make their dreams a reality and their goals accomplishments, their company is their “baby” and sometimes they are blessed to have multiple “babies” throughout their lifetime. But if you ask an entrepreneur “how did you know you were ready to launch your company” and I know that the vast majority of them would say something like, “I didn’t. I just took the leap.” For the most part, entrepreneurs are action-oriented. We can be a little scatterbrained, flighty, and what some medical professionals might label as sufferers of attention deficit disorder. But I like to think of it as a passion to seek, find, explore, test, try…right now. Yeah right now!

If we wait for when we’re ready, if we wait for the perfect time, we may find ourselves empty handed with a bunch of “shoulda, woulda, coulda” thoughts floating around, or worse–we don’t live long enough to have those thoughts haunt us.

I shared my 2017 goals with everyone on January 3rd of this year, and knowing that we’re already in the month of May, I see that I have a lot of work to do to make up on the four months that I’ve allowed to slip past me. I can’t afford to let anyone or anything distract me to the point that I don’t fulfill the things that God has called me to do.

What have you been avoiding? In what ways and in what areas are you procrastinating?

Stop it!

Take action this week toward starting or finishing whatever goal or goals that you have yet to achieve. It’s your life and from what we can tell, we only get one to live out these experiences. So stop wasting precious time waiting for ready and perfect to show up. They aren’t coming!

~Natasha

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