"You don't have to be ready to change." - Mel Robbins

We all wait for the right time to 'feel ready' before committing to doing something different. But that process of ‘waiting for the right time’ often stalls our progress. We inherently have a negativity bias that will highlight all the reasons why we shouldn’t or can’t do something, sabotaging new ideas at the onset because it threatens the current comfort we are experiencing. That’s why motivation is such a convenient excuse... We tell ourselves that there are conditions to when we can try something new.

The primary misconception is - Change doesn’t usually come about because we want it to, it usually comes about because we have to. It’s driven by necessity, and necessity does not require motivation.

Our brains work counter to this and there are a few things we can do to overwrite it. The first is to act quickly. When the impulse strikes, train yourself to take a committed action before your brain gets the chance to intervene and encourage self-preservation. Self-preservation exists in direct contradiction to change, and as Mel Robbins shares in her book “The 5 Second Rule” we have a very narrow window before our brain starts taking action out of self-preservation.

If you don’t feel like doing something, that’s very normal. In fact your brain is influencing you to do that. But you don’t need to feel ready or motivated to do something in order to do it. In every moment we have choice, and inducing change to invest in our future is most often within our best interest.