My client sold his house and bought a swanky condo in a great location. Moving day was in less than a month, and he had barely started packing things for the move. Having ADHD, he has a tendency to put things off until the situation becomes dire, and then it’s, ‘Oh shit! The situation is dire!”  Now seemed like a really good time to work on that.

While exploring his mental block, he kept saying things like, “I would pack up my kitchen but first I need to do…”

“You’re ‘But First’-ing,” I said. “This is a form or Perfection Paralysis. You want to do the task ‘but first’ every step leading up to it needs to be perfect, and at least one step is darn near impossible to achieve. And the task never actually gets done.”

As self-defense practitioners, he and I apply the same principles to breaking a mental freeze as we do in physical situations: Do Two Things to break the freeze and start moving. The actions must actively impact the world—passive steps like meditating or planning don’t count.

Two Things seem to be the Magic Number. If you do just one thing you might get stuck in a repetitive loop. If you do three or more you risk overplanning instead of taking action, much like the freeze you're trying to escape. Starting with two active steps breaks the freeze and builds momentum, allowing you to continue moving forward.

These two actions can be anything, but I recommend choosing one of these approaches

·       “Eating Frogs”: tackling the biggest, hardest tasks first to get them out of the way.

·       “Snowballing”: starting with the easiest tasks to build momentum.

What’s your go-to strategy for breaking a mental freeze? Or, what’s one task you’ve been ‘but first-ing’ that you could tackle today?

Oh, and there’s a bit of wordplay with ‘but first’—like, ‘Stop sitting on your butt first and just start!’ Have fun with it. Special thanks to my chickens for modeling their fluffy butts for the photo.