The Reset Is On You

Good morning. Welcome to Monday. Nobody asked for it, everybody got it and here we are.

Now before you settle in and start warming up your list of reasons why this week might not go the way you planned — the schedule is too full, the timing is off, Mercury is in retrograde, your neighbor got a new dog and it barks at 6 a.m. like it's being paid for it. I need to stop you right there.

This week? That's yours. All of it. The good parts, the hard parts and the parts where you have absolutely no excuse.

I know that's not what you wanted to hear on a Monday morning. You wanted encouragement. Maybe a little inspiration. Something soft and warm with a quote from somebody famous that makes you feel seen without making you feel responsible.

I respect that. I do. But that's not what we're doing today.

Today we are doing the thing nobody on your timeline is going to do for you. We are handing you back your own week and asking you what you plan to do with it.

Because here's what I've noticed about creative people and I say this with love and a healthy amount of sarcasm, we are absolutely world class at having dreams. Extraordinary at it. Olympic level. We can vision board, journal, voice memo and Pinterest our goals into a beautiful digital collage that looks incredible and does absolutely nothing.

The dream is not the problem. The dream is fine. The dream is actually great.

The problem is we keep treating the dream like it's someone else's job to make happen.

We wait for the right person to discover us. We wait for the right moment to start. We wait for somebody to give us permission to take our own goals seriously. And while we're waiting, the week passes. Then the month. Then somehow it's been two years and the book is still an idea and the blog is still a plan and the dream is still a really beautiful collage on a board nobody else can see.

Let me be clear about something. Nobody is coming.

Not to be harsh. Just to be honest. Nobody is going to show up at your door with a publishing contract, a cleared schedule and homemade mac and cheese because they heard you had potential. That is not how any of this works. What actually happens is you decide…for real this time, not vision board real but calendar and alarm clock real. That this week is going to move because you moved it.

Your goals don't need a better week. They need a better decision. And that decision has a name on it. Yours.

So here's the reset. Not the kind you find in a self-help chapter with five steps and a worksheet. The real kind. The kind that happens right now, in the next thirty seconds, when you look at what you said you were going to do and you decide — out loud, to yourself, with full commitment — that this week you are actually going to do it.

Not perfectly. Not without interruptions. Not under ideal conditions because ideal conditions are a myth invented by people who never finished anything.

Just forward. Just one inch further than last week. Just enough movement that by Friday you can look back and say, I did that. Not circumstance. Not luck. Not the universe finally cooperating.

Me. I did that. This week was mine and I showed up for it.

That's the reset, bucko. It was always on you.

Now go get your week.

Marlon Dean, WhiteHause Publishing | The Writerz Block