Begin At The Beginning

I’ve taken the week off of fresh blog posting to settle into my family’s new school routine. I decided to run a few old favorite posts of mine from within the last year. Perhaps you can tell, or maybe it’s only obvious to me because all that is on my mind lately is talking myself into a little courage and confidence to be what my heart is calling out for. Either way, this is another post I thought was worthy of digging out of the archives. Come back tomorrow, I have a fun giveaway to end the week with!

Sometimes I have a very hard time following through with goals that I set for myself. I know that this is pretty much because of one thing. I look too far ahead.

I think it is good and necessary to have some sort of a vision of the future for when a task is completed and to visualize the final product. But when I can’t break it down into the baby steps that are needed to get there, it becomes overwhelming, hard to keep up with, and I end up giving up.

I read a book to my daughter before bed the other night called Begin at the Beginning. The book was about a girl who was given an assignment by her teacher to paint the most wonderful painting ever for a school fair coming up. Talk about pressure! The girl was paralyzed. She was going to paint the universe and wanted it to be spectacular, but she didn’t know where to begin. She was picturing the earth and stars and all the people and everything that makes up the world, which left her too overwhelmed to complete the painting. Crumpled pieces of paper filled her floor.

Finally, she talked to her mother who wisely said for her to “begin at the beginning”. Start with her world and what she sees in front of her instead of starting with the whole universe. So the girl sat in her room at her desk and began to paint. The painting began with a single solitary tree that stood outside her window.

With any goal, by breaking it down into smaller pieces makes it more manageable. Whether it’s a financial goal, a weight loss goal, an exercise goal, or just a goal of getting the house clean, the same method can be used to make it easier to start, continue toward, and ultimately reach the place you visualize. Start with what is right in front of you and you’re sure to create something beautiful.