We’ve all heard, if not lived through stories of someone given a crushing diagnosis — cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc — then being forced to reckon with the consequences of continuing to live the way they have, or change.

Maybe it’s changing their diet and lifestyle overnight to eliminate junk food, focus on consuming only whole foods, make exercise an integral part of their life, and so on.

Faced with the alternative, death, these changes, however drastic, seem to be the only reasonable choice, one that most of us would willingly take as well.

But why do we wait so long to make these changes?

Eating well and exercising didn’t become good choices only because of the crisis we faced. We all know we should be doing them regularly, and yet for so many of us, it takes extreme circumstances to force us out of our old habits and into new ones.

Too often we wait for the breaking point before admitting to ourselves that we need to change things. This is true as much for our businesses and work as it is for our health.

It might be sweeping our cash flow issues under the rug, failing to address poor communication with our team members, or neglecting to establish boundaries with our clients who end up making life harder for us on a daily basis.

Sooner or later, each of these issues will reach a breaking point that will force us to make a painful, monumental shift in the way we approach our work.

So why wait until then?

It will be far less painful to start chipping away at the granite block of issues today and piece by piece, starting to sculpt our work into the shape we really want it to take.

We sell the potential of both ourselves and our work short by waiting to make changes until we’re left with no other choice.

Creating work that matters and living a life that matters requires us to regularly be assessing, honing, re-shaping our actions and habits to better suit who we want to become and what we want to create.

Remember, sculptures take time, you won’t carve it all in one sitting. But you can start today by chipping off the tiniest most manageable piece.

Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

If you’re ready to build your audience and become the go-to authority in your space using podcasting, reach out to our team at Counterweight Creative and see how we can help.

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/dont-let-me-off-easy-56387f881abfhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/dont-let-me-off-easy-56387f881abf