Spring has arrived on the Oregon Coast, daffodils and nettles are up and furry willow buds are decorating the trees along the river. The beginning of this week marks the Spring Equinox which just happens to coincide this year with a new moon in Aries. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and reflects the bold and powerful energy of a fresh start.

I was inspired by author and life coach Martha Beck for this post when I recently listened to her podcast on Beginning.

The act of beginning itself has magic in it. It’s like a door you unlock, and beyond it lies all kinds of adventures. However, it’s for this very reason that many of us hesitate to get started. I have found this to be true in my own life, and I’ve also found that no matter how many times you begin, you always have to begin again.

Beginnings are places where confusion and mistakes are part of landscape. Most of like staying with the known and not messing around with something we’re not familiar with.

When you see something unfamiliar or unusual your brain is designed to react with fear to keep you safe. So every time a new start comes up even if it’s something that we’ve done before, we feel the fear of knowing we haven’t done this particular one before.

Every time you start something new, you go through a death and rebirth phase that is very disorienting, and it’s not something in our particular culture trained us to cope with. We’re supposed to just keep things going well, right? We’d rather just hunker in and do what we know, but try as we might to avoid it= the spring energy of beginning always comes.

So how do you begin? Well you start by seeing beginning as your friend and not as a threat.

But how do you make a friend with beginning when it feels so difficult?

5 Ways Your Brain Can Make Friends with Beginning:

Step 1. Breaking up the Soil.

Think of contemplating a beginning like plowing a field or preparing a garden bed in spring. You start by breaking up the soil of your old way of thinking, your old way of being. You have to make room and till up the soil before you can actually plant new seeds. You start by break up thing your wanting to begin in your mind.

So you picture the thing you are starting in little chunks. Don’t think “I have to begin to write this book” or “clean this house”. Instead chunk that project up into smaller bits that might take you more than like five or 10 minutes. When I go to clear up a garden area, I don’t do it as a one gigantic task, or my brain would come up with all kinds of reasons to avoid it. I have a series of smaller things that make up the big task.

First, I go get my gloves and tools out that I need. Then I pick one spot to put all my weeds. Then I work one area of the bed at at time. Clearing it out in chunks of maybe 5-10 minutes. Once all the chunks of the bed are weeded I put the weeds in a wheel barrow. Then I dump the barrow in the compost. Then I work up the bed in the same chunks. And then I begin the next task and on and on.

So I’ve actually created lots of beginnings, but they’re tiny things, and it’s much, much, much more likely that I’ll begin working in the garden if I just start with going to get my gloves and tools. Every big thing is made up of little things. So till it up and work with each chunk.

The reason we have dashes in our phone numbers, because the mind can’t handle a 10 digit code unless it’s broken into three and four and three. The brain can pretty much handle anything in chunks up to five.

Step 2: Work with your FOMO

One of the best ways you can get yourself motivated is to give yourself FOMO (fear of missing out). Watching another person gardening makes me want to get out there. They look like they’re having such a good time, and when I can see the steps they’re taking, and it makes me much more likely to go do it myself. This is why when we watch a person on social media baking bread suddenly we want to start baking too. It’s like a dress rehearsal for your brain.

Step 3. Set the Stage.

Another way to trick your brain into getting started is to set up your physical environment so you’re more likely to do the thing. If you want to start a new exercise routing in the morning then lay out your exercise clothes the night before, set your alarm and have your water bottle and music loaded and ready to go. This prep will get you far enough along in the process the next morning that your brain isn’t faced with all the resistance of starting from zero. Now that all this prep has been done its much easier to follow through. If you need to write a paper, setting up your computer and a cup of tea and getting out your notes beforehand will make it much easier to sit down at that set up area and write. Often times I will tell myself that all I have to do is just get things ready to start- and it ends up being the very thing that gets me going. This is also the magic behind writing it on your calendar. Once you set aside a time to do the starting- you’ve actually already started and momentum can carry you forward.

Step 4. Imagine the Reward!

If you want to give your dog a pill, one way to trick them to eat it is to get a piece of food and mush the pill into it, then get a bigger piece of food, a more delicious piece of food, and you hold both out. The dog will just scarf down the first one because it’s trying to get to the second one. It doesn’t chew the food enough to taste the pill.

You are not that different from a dog in this regard. Don’t think, “I’m going to write this email.” Instead think I think I’m going to write this email and then make myself a nice cup of tea. Hold out the reward right away before you start. It will be the treat that helps you swallow the pill without realizing it.

Step 5. Break the Ice

When your ready to move into action then use what’s known as ice breakers to give you momentum. Icebreakers are the powerful little ships that sail on the Great Lakes and have knife like prows. They cut up ice on the lakes so bigger ships can come in afterwards.

Ice breakers in this context can look like a writer do her morning pages; where she sits down and writes 3 pages in the morning about anything at all just to get going. An artist might start by taping down a piece of paper and layering in a background color. I will often go in and do a quick brain dump for a marketing email onto a piece of paper and then circle the parts I like the best. That’s an icebreaker for me that makes it much easier to actually start write the thing.

So try using these steps the next time you find yourself procrastinating the beginning.

1. Imagine it doing it in small chunks

2. Set up your area to work a day or hours before you actually intend to start

3. Give yourself FOMO by watching other people do it online or in real life.

4. Intentionally build in a pleasurable reward for getting a chunk of it done and all of it done

5. Break up the starting process into chunks. Ask yourself what’s the #1 action I can start with? And do it.

The result of all this is that instead of being afraid of beginning, you will actually go out looking for new things to begin so that you can be with your new friend.

Making friends with beginning breaks open and reveals all the magic inside it.
The next time you start it will be with more skill, more wisdom, and maybe even with the pleasure of knowing something new will happen.

If you think of life as impermanence, where everything dies and everything’s slipping away.. then you are also living in a world where everything is arising, awakening, renewing and birthing.

What’s new, what’s coming next?

If you’re friends with beginning, you’re continually surprised by the different kinds of genius, power, and magic that come out of it. You may even fall in love with the beginner’s mind, which is part of lots of Asian philosophy, where you treat every moment as a new beginning and every moment shows itself as your new friend.

So I hope you begin something wonderful today, and I hope you notice that something wonderful is always beginning out there, even as other things fall apart.

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few. So go begin and find out what happens next!

xoxo

Ginger

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