Ep. 160: You Don't Need The Plan... You Just Need To Start!

If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure where to begin, this episode is for you.

I talk about why so many of us wait for clarity before taking action — and how that belief keeps us frozen. I share what finally helped me move forward when I didn’t know what I wanted, where I was going, or how to get there.

In this episode, I break it down simply:
 Take responsibility for one piece of your life.
 Question the thoughts that keep telling you it’s too late or too hard.
 And take one small action — just one.

You don’t need a plan. You don’t need certainty. You don’t need to change everything.
 You just need to begin.

If you’ve been waiting for the “right time,” I hope this conversation helps you realize that the power to start has been yours all along.

Not maybe you can.
 Yes, you can. ✨

🌸✨ WELCOME — START HERE ✨🌸
(Consider this your gentle nudge toward something new.)

💖 NEW! The Sprinkle Effect™ Card Deck
52 small mindset shifts to help you reconnect, refocus, and rediscover joy — one sprinkle at a time.
👉 https://bit.ly/4pUvreV

📘 NEW! The Sprinkle Effect™ Book
Small sprinkles. Big change. This is where the magic begins.
👉 https://www.debbierweiss.com/thesprinkleeffect

🌱 FREE GIFT FOR YOU
Kickstart Your New Life
A simple, life-changing workbook for women ready to turn the page and begin again — gently.
✨ Download here: https://www.debbierweiss.com/kickstart

🌸 READY TO GO DEEPER? 🌸
Maybe I Can: Begin to Change Your Life Course
A six-module journey designed to help you move through life transitions with clarity, courage, and confidence — at your own pace, with lifetime access.
👉 https://www.debbierweiss.com/beginchange

🤍 WORK WITH ME
From speaking and workshops to coaching and collaborations — explore all the ways we can sprinkle forward together.
👉 https://www.debbierweiss.com/workwithdebbie

...

Chapters

• 0:00 Time Is Finite, Start Anyway
• 1:27 Ditch Perfection And Embrace Uncertainty
• 2:27 Own Your Choices Without Self-Blame
• 4:40 Control Your Response And Thoughts
• 6:14 Catch The Stories You Tell Yourself
• 8:03 The Hobby Excuse And Time Audit
• 10:14 Reclaim Time From Phone And TV
• 12:16 Begin With One Clear Area
• 14:15 Tiny Actions Build Clarity
• 16:08 Boundaries, Saying No, And Seasons
• 18:05 Information Gathering, Not Forever Decisions
• 19:35 Pick One Thought, One Action, Once
• 21:02 You’ve Got This—Make It Happen

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Maybe I Can Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Weiss, and thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you being here with all the different choices that are out there with podcasts. Boy, don't I know it. I'm like, I never know what to listen to. I have so many different people that I follow and just not enough time. So I get it. So I just want you to know how much I appreciate you being here. Okay, let's dive right in. Last week I talked about when I had an aha moment and I realized, you know, time is running out. I hate to say it that way. I think about it like a big hourglass that you turn over and you see the sand coming down. Life is finite. It's for a finite amount of time here on this earth. And I know you're listening to this because, like me, you want to make the best of that time. But it's overwhelming to figure out how. Maybe I know that I want something to change. I want something more in my life, but I don't know where it is or what it is. And you feel stuck and overwhelmed, like there's so many different choices. You might feel, as I did, what if I picked the wrong thing? Well, that's what I want to dive into today. There is no wrong thing. Everything, even if it doesn't lead you to where you think you ultimately want to go, it's a learning experience. You've got to start by taking that pressure off yourself. I know I always want to have, it's like the analytic brain in me. I want to know where I'm going. I want to know how I'm going to get there. And that uncertainty stresses me out. I'm trying to learn to embrace the uncertainty and know that things don't have to be perfectly planned. How often do you perfectly plan something? It doesn't work out that way. I don't know why we think you can't start something until you know the exact steps. That's not the case. You don't need to know the answers. You just need one place to start. For me, the first place to start is taking responsibility for your life. It's a tough one because you have to take a hard look at yourself. You have to be honest with yourself. And I, for me, I never took responsibility for my life. I thought that I did, and maybe I did in some areas, but overall, not really, because I was blaming everyone else or the circumstances surrounding my life wasn't progressing as I hoped, or I wasn't enjoying my life as much as I hoped. I just said, well, there's nothing that I can do about it. And that's not true. That's why you're listening to this. We have to take responsibility for the actions that we take when life throws us a curveball. Right? Instead of just throwing your hands up and saying, This is horrible. What am I supposed to do? Like I once did. Instead, you have to say to yourself, okay, this is outside of my control. But what do I have the power to do to control? How I respond to this situation. Taking responsibility isn't about blaming yourself because when I look back on my life and I realize how many years, how many decades really that I blamed circumstances, people, and when I took responsibility for myself, it was a little, I guess I would say, jarring, because I then turned and said, Oh my gosh, this is all my fault. But I don't want you to feel that way. It's not the case. Instead of blaming yourself, it's understanding that you have the power. You take responsibility, you have the power to control your life. You don't have the power to control other people or the circumstances, but you always have the power to control how you respond to those things. And that's what the secret is. You have the power to control how you react. Oh boy, that's a big one. Control your thoughts around specific circumstances in your life. And control your choices. Don't worry about what you did in the past. It's in the past. If we spend most of our time living in the past with coulda, shoulda, woulda's, how is that possibly going to help us? It's not. You're gonna get stuck in a loop, you're gonna be telling negative things and negative stories to yourself. That is not helpful. That only keeps you stuck, that only keeps you small. The second thing is we need to try and learn that we control our thoughts. I've said this before, but I never had any idea that my thoughts weren't true. Now, maybe that sounds crazy to you, because on the surface, it sounds crazy to me too, but I never stopped to examine my thoughts. I just figured I think it, so it must be so. I was telling myself stories with my thoughts. And I never took the time to stop and realize that I have control of what I'm thinking. Let's use a concrete example, right? If you want to learn a new hobby, you can tell yourself, ugh, well, I don't have time. I don't have time to learn a new hobby. Look at all my responsibilities, and in your mind, you're running through all of the things, and you're proving to yourself with your thoughts, yeah, I might want to start a new hobby, and maybe someone else can, watching someone on social media do something that you long to do, but you're telling yourself, because of your situation, you don't have the time. You know, someday you'll have the time, right? But now is not. I'm not ready. Well, is that really, really true? If you stop to examine this loop that you've gone down, and you go back and say, okay, I'm taking responsibility for the situation. Yes, I do have all of these responsibilities, things that I have to do that might keep me busy. Is there really no time, no time at all to take one action, even if it's for five minutes, ten minutes, you research something? I don't know. I have to think of something. I only go back to knitting because I think that's the latest hobby that I took on. And now it's actually been three years. I've done it and then I've stopped and then I've come back to it. And just like maybe a month ago, I said to my friend who taught me how to knit, I asked her, have you been knitting? And she said, No. What about you? I said, No, I think it's been a year. I found a scarf that I made last year that I stuck in my bag, and I needed her help to help me cast off because even though I've been doing it off and on for three years, I really don't feel the need to learn certain things. I just find it relaxing. But boy, it's been a year since I've done this. How come? Well, I've been so busy. Yes, I have been so busy, but do I sit in front of the TV sometimes? I do I scroll on my phone, and next thing I know it's 45 minutes or an hour later, and I wanted to go to bed an hour ago because I'm scrolling, and all I've been doing is watching videos. Okay, how much time am I taking to do those kinds of things? Oh, two hours a day. It was just I was too busy, but I'm making a choice. I am making a conscious choice to instead of, let's say in my case, knit, I am scrolling. And so I can't tell myself I don't have the time. The truth is I'm choosing to use my time in a different way, doing different things. And here's the thing: if you're good with that, that's fine, but don't give in to those thoughts of, oh, I don't have the time. You see how taking responsibility to say no, it's not that I don't have the time, it's that I'm making a choice to not use my time to learn about X, whatever that hobby. It could be anything, it could be a hobby, taking a class, starting a business, dating. It could be so many things. It could really be anything. You have to stop and examine those thoughts, and that's hard because it's so easy, especially because you've been doing it, me too, my whole life, and I never stopped to examine it. So it's hard when you have to get into a new habit. Examine one thought, be aware of your thoughts. That is the start of it, is actually being aware of the stories that you're telling yourself. You have to try and catch yourself. It's not easy, but it is so freeing because once you're able to do that, you're able to stop and say to yourself, no, that's not true. And I don't want to think like that. And switch it up. And the moment I stopped waiting and telling myself, well, I'll have more time after this happens, or once I have more money, or once my kids are out of a house, they are stories, they're not necessarily true. So if you really want to make some kind of change in your life, you have to own up. It doesn't mean that you have been doing something wrong. It just means that now you're ready to take the next step towards creating the life that you want, whatever that is. And if you're like me and you don't even know what that is, that's okay. We're just gonna pick one area, one hobby, one thing that you want to change in your life. So first you've got to take responsibility, then you've got to really start examining your thoughts and shift them. Realize that it's stories because you're telling yourself it's too late, I can't change until this changes. I'm not talking about, oh, think positively. Not that that's a bad thing. It really is about questioning. So I want you to stop telling yourself, I don't know what to do, I don't know where to go from here, I don't know where to start. Just because you don't know yet, you don't know what direction you're headed in, it doesn't mean that you can't begin. I remember when I came back from my 50th birthday trip and took stock of my life, realized, oh my goodness, how could I be 50? That happened so fast. It's not like my life is awful. I have a pretty good life, but I want more out of life. I don't know what that more is. When you don't see the path, it is overwhelming. And it's easy to say to yourself, well, I gotta figure this out. I can't do anything until I figure it out. Just taking some small steps forward, it's like dominoes. It really is that first little domino, that first little step. I'm taking responsibility, I'm changing my thoughts. So, what one action can you take to just you in a different direction? You've got to choose. And I think for each of us, we know what it is. We might not know where we want to go, but for me, when I came back from that trip, I thought, okay, I don't know how to change my life. It's too overwhelming. But I did know I had to do something about my health when it came to my weight. And I've talked about it a lot. That's where I decided to begin. I needed to take one small action. For me, that small action was attending a Weight Watcher's meeting every week. Heck, that small action is going online and looking up where the Weight Watchers meetings are close to me. What is the schedule? What fits in? What would what time, day, and time would fit in the easiest to make it easy for me to attend a meeting? I didn't know how much weight I wanted to lose. I wasn't thinking about that, which in the past I always had. It's too overwhelming. I'm just gonna go to a meeting. That's it. One small action. And just taking that small action, it kind of gets you unstuck. It brings clarity. One little thing, and you do it, and you're like, oh, okay, that makes sense, or it doesn't make sense, and you go to something else. Taking that one little step, gosh, it brings you confidence. It really does. It's like, okay, I did it, I can do this. What's another little step I can take? But don't do that too quickly. Start. It could be sending an email to someone, having a conversation. It's one decision. Maybe it is creating one boundary. I started realizing that every time I was saying yes to something, I was saying no to something else. I always said yes because I wanted to help people and please people, regardless of what it was doing for me. So maybe it's creating one boundary. Maybe it's not saying yes right away the next time someone asks you for something that makes it very difficult for you. Do what you need to do for yourself. So I would say yes, someone needed me to do some kind of volunteer thing. Now, am I saying something's wrong with volunteering? Absolutely not. I'll never stop volunteering. It really is fulfilling. But at different times in your life, sometimes I have more to give, and other times I have less. When I was starting to want to change my life, changing my thinking, taking responsibility, it made me realize it's okay to say no. It's just this season of my life that maybe I can't volunteer for this position. That was creating a boundary. Take one step that you've been avoiding. Be honest with yourself. Maybe you are afraid because you think you're gonna fail, or you're not good enough, or you're gonna be judged. Take that step. You're not making a lifetime's commitment. This whole process is really information gathering. You take an action, you say, okay, that action really helped. What's another action I can take moving me in that direction? Or yeah, I'm not feeling it. Let me regroup and shift. You're getting information. You're not deciding your entire future. That is the overall message I want to leave you with. Trying to figure out your overall future and exactly how to get there is not gonna happen. It's not helpful. Those kinds of things keep us stuck. You just need to take a step and see how it feels. I want you to choose one thing you can do one time. Not daily, even. Daily is overwhelming. One little thing you can do one time. That's it. Nothing big. One small thing. I want you to do it once. But taking responsibility gives you power. It gives you the power because you can see that you have the power to control your lives. Even when things pop up that are uncontrollable, you still have the power. When you shift your thoughts, you're giving yourself permission to think differently, to act differently, to not react all the time. And then you take that one small action, that one little domino that you're pushing over, and it gives you momentum. You don't need to do any of these things perfectly, and you don't need to do them in a certain order. Most people don't get unstuck by figuring everything out. They just get unstuck by taking one little step, right? One little sprinkle, which is what I always talk about. You don't need clarity and you don't need a plan. You just need to take responsibility, shift your thoughts, and take one step. Small action. So let me leave you with this thought. You don't need to change your whole life. Take responsibility for one piece. Shift one thought. And do one small thing. And then stop. You've got this. I know you do. You can do this. I have faith in you. Alright. Let's go. Let's get out there. Make it happen. I'll see you next week. And I can't wait to hear. I would love for you to DM me at Debbie.r.wiss and let me know what changed for you this week after listening to this. How did you take responsibility? Change your thought and take one small action. Share it with me or email me at debi at debriss.com. Make it a great week. Cause not maybe you can. Yes, you can.