What Happens When We Are In Over Our Heads?
I love the "ready, fire, aim" principle when chasing a dream. This concept states that we should get a plan 60% ready to go and then go all in on it. After we've had some experience, we can return to the drawing board and adjust our aim. We do this because we will never be 100% confident in our plans, and so often, people get trapped in a cycle of planning that they never actually put something into action.
It's the same concept as leap, and the net will appear. At a certain point, we just have to hope and acknowledge that we've done everything possible to prepare. This doesn't mean acting recklessly. It just means that we set boundaries that put us in a position to be most successful.
The benefit of this strategy is that it springs us into action. The downside is that we can quickly find ourselves in over our heads. That's not necessarily a bad thing because necessity is the mother of all inventions, but it's also something that we have to be ready to deal with.
With this new business system, I jumped in well before I was ready, but I was fully aware of that fact. For one thing, I knew the train was leaving with or without me, so I wanted to be on it. The bigger reason I jumped was that I felt this task came with more of a knowledge gap than a skill gap for me to overcome, and I was confident in my ability to learn.
I quickly discovered that it was both a skill and knowledge gap, but I am learning to close those quicker than expected. One of the biggest things I've noticed, though, is that I am way over my head with some of these things. And if you fire without 100% accuracy in your aim, then this is likely a position that you will also find yourself in.
In most of these situations, we can see where the surface of the water is. We know how deep we are and how many strokes will get us to the top. We just have to figure out how to move our arms, kick our legs correctly, and then give it our best shot.
Here's the problem with being in over our heads (and I'll drop the water analogy in a minute because being underwater for too long freaks me out): We don't always realize we are in too deep until it is too late to do anything about it. If we jump into a pool thinking we'll be able to touch the bottom, it can be pretty jarring to realize how deep it goes. It's the same way with any dream endeavor. We have to jump. That's the only way to get in, but jumping in can easily take our status from totally fine to critical very quickly.
The nice thing about being in a critical situation is that we are only given two options: sink or swim. And when those are the choices, there's only one real option to consider. If we decide to swim, then we choose to fight and keep our dream alive. That will look different for each of us, depending on what dream we are currently chasing. For my dream, it looks like diving into books and videos about the concepts that I need more than a surface knowledge of.
In the best-case scenario, we catch up to where we need to be, and no one even notices we are behind to begin with. In the worst case, we fall short, and everyone knows we are over our heads. The good news is the odds aren't up to the flip of a coin. We get to choose how we handle a situation like this. Do we put our heads down and do the work or panic and hide from it?
I'm not saying that we can outsmart people with years of experience in front of us. But I don't think the worst-case scenario coming true is the worst thing that could happen to us. In those scenarios, we either find someone to walk beside us and support us, or we lose and start again with more experience. Maybe we catch up in time, and perhaps we don't, but isn't trying for our dreams better than not trying at all?
Being out of our depth isn't the most fun position to be in, but when we decide to try and catch up, how do we do it? One step at a time. Surrounded by a wealth of things we don't know is incredibly overwhelming. We approach that like eating an elephant—one bite at a time. Our goal should always be to grow by inches, not by miles. Taking on too many things at once will overwhelm us even more to the point that we risk burnout. Piece by piece, we do what we can until we see how far we've come. And once everything comes together we will be so glad that we jumped all in in the first place.