“As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.” – Rumi

The last few weeks in this space have been about change and not accepting defeat and not settling for less than our best.  Our brilliant readers (not being sarcastic) have pointed out that each of those things sounds great until you actually have to do them.  Then what?

The answer to that question for too many leaders is “Not much”.  They tiptoe up to the line of action and then stop.  There are surely a lot of reasons for that, but they all boil down to one thing: fear.

We have been trained to avoid mistakes at all costs.  Mistakes lead to failure, embarrassment, or whatever other horrible outcome keeps you up at night.  Mistakes are scary.  If we can just avoid mistakes, then we’ve done our job as a leader.

The problem is that the only way to avoid mistakes is to never do anything, and never doing anything leads to far more failure than doing things imperfectly.  History is full of organizations that ceased to exist because they didn’t change or try new things.  And when you change and try new things, there will be bumps in the road.

Get out on the road.  You won’t know in advance what every single step on the path to your destination will be.  Deal with it.  Start taking steps anyway.  You don’t have to know what step #46 will be; just start with step #1.

Think about what you’re facing in your organization.  What is the change you know you need to make, or the barrier you know you need to address, or the opportunity you know you need to take advantage of?  What would be one action you could take that would move you in the right direction?  You may not know what comes after that one action, but start with that.

As leaders, we have to keep ourselves and our organizations moving forward, and we can’t do that by sitting still.  You won’t know all the steps.  You won’t know all the challenges in front of you.  The only way to figure that out, and to find the solutions, is to move forward.  So get going.