When Getting Started Is Overwhelming

I have a soft spot for corny 80's flicks, and one of my all-time favorites is What About Bob? Bob suffers a multi-phobic personality, and has come under the care of a pompous, condescending, and ultimately misguided psychiatrist. In one of the early scenes of the movie, Bob grabs his psychiatrist and wails, "I need! I Need! I NEED!"I think this is an emotional experience that most of us - even as adults - experience from time to time. As moms and entrepreneurs we feel it...well...um...let's just say a bit more frequently than 'from time to time.'Bob gets one really apt piece of advice from his psychiatrist and that is:baby steps. He tells Bob, "It means setting small, reasonable goals for yourself.  One day at a time.  One tiny step at a time."  Not bad advice for a fraud shrink, eh?This idea of baby stepping has many useful applications in life. But where baby steps become absolutely crucial are for entrepreneurs just starting out in their first entrepreneurial venture.I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My parents jointly operated a small business from our home throughout most of my growing up. But with the economic downturn came some major financial and personal hardships for our family. My parents sold a still lucrative business at a loss and separated.My dad took a job at an electrical components company, and my mom...well, she froze.Because even though my parents had jointly owned and (to some extent) jointly run the family business, my dad handled the bulk of the business administration. My mom has been busy for the last several decades raising her seven children.She doesn't have a college degree, and she has no work resume whatsoever. She is a smart, capable, and talented woman. Like so many other moms out there, she just didn't know where to begin.For as long as I can remember my mom has cooked up an outstanding honey cinnamon syrup recipe that we would slather all over nearly any food group, especially waffles, pancakes, and ice cream. We always told her she could market it and sell it as her million dollar idea.

What Holds Us Back

So, when it came time for mom to figure out a new livelihood for herself we asked her, "What about the syrup?" And for a while, it seemed she was seriously considering it. And then it seemed that the idea had smoldered too long in that unexecuted idea stage and snuffed out.When I asked her about it, she mentioned the obstacles that were stopping her.  "I don't know how to make labels." She told me. "Also, I don't know if I can make and sell food products without a commercial kitchen. And I don't know what that would take. Besides, getting approved is probably cost-prohibitive."I stewed a bit over what she told me. I could see how this administrative minutia could rapidly take the steam out of a good idea. It really can be daunting knowing where to begin.I remembered when, not long ago, I was trying to find my way to begin a career of writing fiction. I floundered around at home, forcing myself into long and painstaking writing sessions. I even read Stephen King's memoir/guide to aspiring fiction writers.But I couldn't figure out how to go to the next level. To the level where my writing was more than an idea, or a fledgling (and frustrating) hobby."Why don't you take a class?" My husband (an annoyingly level-headed pragmatist and a blessedly stabilizing counterpart to my neuroses) offered."Yeah. Yeah, that's an idea," was my lame noncommittal response. It seems important to insert here that I do know how to sign up for and even excel in classes. I graduated summa cum laude from a liberal arts college - I thrive on taking classes. So, what was the problem?The problem was that getting started is overwhelming.It is much easier to advise a friend or loved one on taking an entrepreneurial leap, than it is to move toward one's own entrepreneurial vision. It seems that somehow the most capable among us, begin crumbling under the pressures of first steps, when those first steps are in the direction of our most cherished personal aspiration.I'm no psychiatrist but I suspect the reason is something visceral, essential, and protective. Something that has outlived its usefulness. Something like a vestigial organ. Having an unexecuted entrepreneurial vision is like a security for our sense of meaning, for our fear of failure.If we don't try it, we can't fail at it, and we can still tell ourselves every day that this idea has redemptive possibilities for our life.  Redemptive possibilities are a really nice idea. Who would want to risk losing them just to try something that might fail?? So we sit on our visions, like mother ducks over-incubating and thereby smothering their offspring.

How to Get Moving

I did end up taking that writing class. And it launched me forward in my writing career more than I could have imagined. It's funny how it happened though. Or maybe sad.At any rate, it involved my sweet husband picking up a class catalog from a local liberal arts college, placing it in my hands, turning the pages and pointing, "Look, a class on writing creative non-fiction. That seems like a good starting point. And classes begin next week."And so, with no sensible objections left and a path laid out in front of me, I took a baby step forward.Having gotten past my own primary obstacle, I began thinking again about the things sabotaging my mom's progress. So I called her up.Excitedly, I told her that I had done some research and decided to create an online tool that outlined all the beginning steps to creating a food-based business (See what I mean about more capable with other people's visions?). That way, she could understand exactly which obstacles she would face in her business and how to overcome them."Well, actually, I do have that information," she told me. I was confused. "But I thought that was what was holding you back...?" She told me she had signed up for a class on beginning a food-based business. It was a three-hour seminar in a single sitting where the presenters crammed information down the throats of tremulous would-be entrepreneurs. No wonder.When starting out, it's too much to think about every step at once. When in the realm of the new and unfamiliar, sometimes all we can process are small informational sound bytes. One step at a time.It isn't enough to have all of the information. We live in an information age. Many things are lacking in our society, but information isn't one of them. Pacing, on the other hand, is. And this is the conclusion I'm coming to in all of this. When overwhelmed with starting, we need small actionable steps. Baby Steps.And sometimes we need someone to hold our hand a little. Not because we aren't able on our own, but because some vestigial part of our brain tells us we can't, worried we will fail. And somehow failure seems worse than never beginning at all. But it isn't.How could it be? Where would the duck population be today, if mother ducks everywhere calculated their risks of failure as mothers to be too high and sat on their eggs forever? Okay, with that last, I've probably taken the duck analogy too far. :) But you get the idea.

Is there an idea you've been sitting on that needs to get hatched?  Or maybe, as a veteran mompreneur, you can suggest baby steps for myself or my mom in our entrepreneurial journeys?  Tell us in the comments.