Just Take One Step

I've been doing a fair amount of reading about the brain & anxiety in the past few weeks.  I just read that 12% of Canada's population deals with an anxiety disorder at any given time - 12% of 33 million people is just under 4 million people!

I wonder something...our culture is very focused on goal setting and planning.  Obsessed almost.  This focus fundamentally assumes that we somehow have control over the future.  Could it be possible that this assumption of control unconsciously contributes to heightened stress, worry &  fear?  I do understand that anxiety is a more complex symptom of a number of root causes, but I can't imagine that this control illusion that we are all taught from a young age is not a part of the story.

I do not suffer with an anxiety 'disorder' but I had a funny experience recently where my own  'control' programming certainly increased my anxiety.  I was contemplating taking my one month leave from work and then got immediately absorbed in 'figuring out' what would happen after the leave.  I got seriously stressed out about what the next steps would look like 'Will I go back to work full time? What if they don't want me back, what else should I do?  What if I can't find other work?  Should I go back to school?  We'll have to sell the boat...so many what if's - seriously good training for building a plan, cuz I should have a plan, right - we're supposed to have a plan. Then my counsellor friend said to me  'Jodi, just take one step.  You can't possibly know the next step until you take the first one.'  

Just Take One Step?  Not have a plan?  Flies in the face of all the planning approaches I have ever been taught - especially by leadership pundits.

Just Take One Step.  Huh?

I immediately had this visual of me stepping on a big button making a curtain slide away and a new version of the world appeared - a world I wouldn't have seen until I took that one step.

So that's what the last 3 weeks have looked like for me - one step after another with no real end goal other than 'Joy'.  The absolute opposite of control.  Feels weird, super foreign and entirely liberating.  I am feeling the opposite of anxious.  What could happen for people if we stopped perpetuating the idea that you must have a plan?  I wonder what possibilities could show up for people taking one step at a time?

If you are stressing yourself out by looking way into the future, fearing all the what if's, take it from me, let go of the idea that you are in control, that you need a 'plan' and just take one step - the next step will reveal itself and it might be entirely different than you could have imagined.