I realized that I like the planning stages of things—I like the anticipation and the excitement of a new project.  I like the feeling of creating and developing ideas.  The execution is a different story. I find myself distracted and doing things that don’t help the initial cause so to speak.  When I complete something I’ve planned, I feel a sense of pride, yes, but I also feel a hollowness of like, what’s next?  A weird sensation of falling flat that doesn’t necessarily come from failure or things not turning out, it’s just when things are over, there is this natural come down that we all experience—a slight deflating feeling.  I love the excitement that comes from a vision forming and creating a plan to make it happen.  And I don’t know if I subconsciously like keeping myself in that state because I will find myself accepting more and more work and getting more and more behind in what I want to be doing and I never really start what I want to do.  Eventually I have such a full plate that I end up doing nothing.

That is the problem with being in a perpetual state of planning:  it doesn’t do anything.  It’s all talk and hype, and yes it feels amazing—but it isn’t resolving anything.  Sometimes the work is boring and I’ve looked at people with different careers and I’ve asked how to keep that initial excitement alive.  How do I learn to enjoy all parts of this sandwich?  I’ve written a piece about this before, but I want to reference it again: Brene Brown says that all things we undertake have a shit sandwich—nothing is all good.  So she says we need to figure out what shit sandwich we are willing to eat.  What are we comfortable taking the good AND the bad of?  What excites us even through the bad parts? When things get rough, are we still excited to keep going/eating?  It’s hard to face the let down of a set back when things don’t go as planned, and yes, it’s a bummer to come down at the finish of something.  But there is also a different high when something is executed how we envisioned it.

We can be planners and we can get excited over what we see.  But more than planners, talkers, reworking, whatever we want to call it, we need to be doers.  We have to go beyond where we are comfortable and see if our ideas hold water and we need to be ready to try again and do that over and over again until we get to the point we were looking for: the resolution.  I think this is an old habit, stemming from when I was a kid and didn’t know who I was.  I would plan what college I wanted to go to and then get afraid of something arbitrary—ultimately I was afraid I couldn’t take care of myself—and then I would retreat.  Then I’d get excited and plan again and retreat.  So the full exploration of self never really happened.  And that left me with the thrill of planning and thinking of things to create.  The follow through is where the meat is, however.  We can’t let old wounds and habits dictate where we are at and we aren’t meant to live in a constant state of pre-event high.  We eventually need to see things through, we need to decide who we are and follow through.