Finally, after years of trying to reach a goal and learn a specific skill by myself, I hired an expert. The only time I've paid for expertise for myself before was mainly due to health and my career. To hire someone to help me obtain a goal simply because I want to reach that goal for myself is quite a gift to myself. For years now, my husband and I have been paying all kinds of people and institutions to support our sons' educations and interests, and they have profited greatly from that expertise. Now it is my turn--what a treat.
In a sense, hiring an expert to help out was like handing the responsibility of the task to him. "Here it is--now it's your job," I felt like saying. Now that doesn't mean I no longer have any responsibility in this arena, but it means that the heavy weight of trying to manage a situation that I actually wasn't an expert at and that I had been unsuccessful at for a long time has lightened.
So as I engaged in the lessons, I found myself thinking, don't overthink this--let them tell you what to do, and then follow their expert advice. There was a great sense of comfort in those those thoughts. I don't think I've coached myself not to overthink even once in my life since almost every task I've chosen or been asked to do since I was very young involved lots and lots of thinking. As you know, I love to think, but when it comes to a circuitous set of thoughts that lead nowhere over time, I can easily give up on that.
Most people complete most tasks for themselves and their families because that's affordable, and in many cases that's a fine, engaging thing to do, but there are tasks that lie outside of our expertise, and that's when it is worth saving up to hire an expert to help you out. This could be a one time thing. For example, for years we were disatisfied with our backyard. We did what we could on our own, but then we finally hired a landscape expert to come in and make some simple changes. Now we enjoy our yard 100 times more. I wish we had done this earlier rather than think we could do it all by ourselves.
There have been other times when I've hired experts or signed on to expert classes that have not worked out--at those times, I simply didn't have the time to take full advantage of the expertise or the expert wasn't a good match for our needs. Finding the right expert is important when it comes to meeting a challenging goal.
Once you have the expert in place, it's true that you don't have to overthink it since they are the ones doing a lot of the thinking, planning, assessing, and revising. You can simply follow along--do as your told, and there is some great relief in that. Onward.