Picture this: You’re on a quiet walk in the woods. The sun is shining through the leaves. A gentle breeze is blowing. The birds are chirping. Out of nowhere, a giant bear comes crashing through the brush in front of you. You’re gripped by fear. Your fight or flight instincts take over. Your heart pounds and your mouth goes dry. Palms sweat. Muscles tense.
What exactly is happening here? On the surface, it seems a highly uninteresting question. A bear appeared, you got scared, and your body mobilized. The cause-and-effect relationship between your feelings and actions seems obvious.
But what’s actually going on isn’t so simple. Research in psychology paints a much more nuanced picture of the relationship between our feelings and our actions. We think it’s a one-way street — feelings, such as fear, lead to actions, like fight or flight. In reality, each is fueled by the other. The sight of the bear triggers fear, the fear causes our muscles to tense, the tensing of our muscles reinforces the fear signal to our brain, and so on. In other words, the interplay between feelings and actions looks less like a one-way street and more like a feedback loop.
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This may seem like a pointless academic distinction — especially if a bear is considering you for lunch — but the implications are profound. Understanding the true nature of the relationship between feelings and actions can give us tremendous leverage to overcome procrastination and unlock maximum impact.
Most of us have work we know we should be doing, but we push it off. We wait for the right feeling to put us in motion. When we understand this is a two-way street, we can see we have it backward. You don’t have to feel motivated to take action; you have to take action to feel motivated.
Consider your own work. How often have you punted on that half-written proposal? How many times have you avoided that difficult conversation you need to have with an employee? How long have you been putting off planning that ambitious business development event? You are waiting to feel “ready.” Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that once things calm down, you’ll invest time into process improvement. Or once the next big job wraps up, you’ll finally get the team together to talk through documentation standards. The problem is that feeling you’re waiting for — the motivation, the focus, the clarity — rarely shows up on its own.
The reality is that motion creates momentum. We’ve all experienced this. You start cranking on that challenging proposal, and the creative breakthroughs follow. You initiate the difficult conversation, and the communication begins to flow. You take that first difficult step on the business development plan, and the inspiration kicks in. It’s a common enough experience, but we rarely stop to reflect on it. When we do, the takeaway is clear: Getting to the result we want requires paying less attention to how we feel and more to what we do.
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This is especially important in our industry. As integrators, we’re constantly putting out fires, juggling client demands, and fielding surprises from job sites. It’s easy to stay reactive, always waiting for the right time or the right mindset to do the work that’s going to move the business forward. But the right time never comes. The right mindset doesn’t arrive on its own; you have to build it. And the raw material is your actions.
Big things happen when we stop waiting for inspiration and choose instead to create it ourselves.
