And so it begins...

I must admit that I have had an aversion to writing as long as I can remember. In school, I always did all of my homework before touching any essay, usually leading to late nights and feeding my distaste for writing. However, a series of events that have happened in my life recently convinced me to give blogging a try...

While reading Marshall Goldsmith's "What Got You Here Won't Get You There," Goldsmith outlines 20 flaws that he sees as the main deterrents that keep good leaders from becoming great. Two that struck a chord for me were #12 Making excuses and #20 An excessive need to be me. Both are similar in that they detail a leader who accepts their own flaws, justifying them by saying "That's just me. Deal with it." For example, one might say "I'm just no good at managing my time; that's just the way I am." This particular excuse is one I have used for years. I rationalized my poor time management by explaining how well I worked under pressure. While I always meet deadlines and turn in quality work, my sleep often suffers. In addition, I accepted that writing was just "not for me." In the leadership training I have been through, I have learned about the power of positive thoughts as well as how crippling negative thoughts can be. While it seems silly, my belief that I disliked writing became a self-fulfilling prophecy that kept me from writing. How long would I write a blog before I became tired of writing?

Finally, while at the gym a few days ago, I noticed a sign that said "Know that commitment is a muscle." I realized that when I began regularly attending the gym in my first year of college, I convinced myself that I loved to go. In the past 3 years since, I have been to the gym 5 or 6 days a week almost every week. I had convinced myself that the gym was the best part of my day--it was an hour that I could forget about my to-do list and the aching that I felt when I left gave me great satisfaction. It didn't take long to see the result, which only motivated me to go more often, learn more about fitness and work out harder. This gave me the drive to begin a blog and know that through practice I would be able to sustain it and learn to enjoy writing. Hopefully my skill at writing and the ease with which the words flow will only improve as I continue to write and it will continue to motivate me as I had been motivated by the results of working out. If I can overcome the one thing that makes me procrastinate more than anything else, maybe it can help with my time management as well.