Our inspiration is always there, but it's at the moment when we commit to something and make the start that we let inspiration in.

Today, I pressed the timer on this piece not knowing what I was going to write about. And more time than I am comfortable with slipped by.

And then… well, I had to start, because if I didn’t start, nothing would happen.

When I was finalising How to Start When You’re Stuck for publication, I wanted to double check the quotations I had in there. On page one was a beautiful phrase written by Steven Pressfield in his incredibly influential (on me) book, The War of Art.

'If I’m going to quote Pressfield,' I thought, 'let’s get it right.'

So I googled the quotation, but found nothing.

'Huh. Maybe I got it significantly wrong,' I thought.

So I got out The War of Art and skimmed through it. Through the whole thing, looking for the chapter and the page that contained it. I found things like it, but not the exact lines. Where did this come from?

I checked his other books, Do The Work, Turning Pro. But I knew as I was doing it that I wouldn’t find it. I had known this quotation since before I had read those books.

I was stumped.

I googled it again. And I saw the article at the top of Google, that I had ignored before. It was an article of mine. I had ignored it because I had known that it just quoted Pressfield. But where was I quoting it from?

This time I clicked on the article.

And there it was. No quotation marks. Just a sentence. Written not by Steven Pressfield, but by me.

Here is what it said: our inspiration is always there, but it's at the moment when we commit to something and make the start that we let inspiration in.

One of the fundamental ideas of The 12-Minute Method. A foundation of How to Start When You’re Stuck.

I thought about taking it out – it wasn’t Pressfield, and could I really open my book with something I had written?

And then I realised. Well, what a ridiculous question? Of course I could. In fact, I should. We all should. Not hide behind other people’s words. But put our ideas front and centre. ESPECIALLY in our own books.

If I hadn’t thought I was quoting Pressfield, I might well not have put anything there, let alone this beautiful sentence, which I love. Of course, I only came to love them, really, thinking they were someone else’s. But I did come to love them.

One of my clients and I talked about this recently. How hard it can be to love ourselves. And how perhaps one of the roles we play in loving others is to teach them that they are loveable. Really, truly, loveable. That, indeed, is what my client and my loved ones have been teaching us. So that one day we could love ourselves.

And by loving those sentences thinking they were someone else’s, I was able to love them when they were, in fact, mine.

They weren’t just mine – there is no new wisdom in the world. They were certainly inspired by The War of Art, by Pressfield’s talk of muses and angels around us.

But these ones, they were mine. An accidental offering from the universe.

I first wrote them when The Coaching School made me give a presentation about something as part of my qualification.

Then, I wrote them again in the article above. Except I originally wrote that article for someone’s blog. But they didn’t publish it. And in the end, wondering if it was Resistance that was stopping it getting published, I published it myself.

Then I thought it was Pressfield.

Then I realised it wasn’t.

And now, here it is, being proven right again, on a day when I didn’t know what wanted to be written until I made a start. And it became a story of faith in myself, of how love teaches us we can love.

From a presentation request, via an unpublished article and a published one, to a badly labelled quotation, to a properly labelled quotation. To this article.

To you.

That is some set of stars aligning to bring this idea to you, today.

And so: what does it mean? What does it mean for you, today?

Where should you start?

—

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The first two 12-Minute Method books are out now!

Sign up to my mailing list to receive digests of 12-minute articles every month or two.