Dive Right In:
The Hardest Part Is Starting

If you know me well, you know I'm the kind of person who likes to make things happen. It's one of my stronger personality traits and probably a little bit of the Aries in me. I'm also a recovering perfectionist who can procrastinate spectacularly when something feels too big, too complicated or like I need to have every detail figured out before I begin.

I've learned that those two sides of me are more connected than they seem. Sometimes the biggest obstacle between wanting to do something and actually doing it is simply starting.

Make the First Step Smaller

We have a tendency to make goals enormous before we've even begun. We think about the final result, everything it will require and all the ways we might fail somewhere between here and there. Suddenly, doing nothing feels much easier.

I've found that giving myself a minimum baseline works much better. What's the smallest thing I can do that moves me in the direction I want to go? Start there. You can always do more once you're moving.

And because apparently I needed a very literal lesson in diving into something before I felt ready, mine came from the Atlantic Ocean.

The First Plunge

For years, I watched people run into the Atlantic on New Year's Day during visits home from California and thought they were completely nuts. Who voluntarily runs into freezing ocean water in the middle of winter?

Then 2020 happened. It was an incredibly difficult period of my life. We were in the middle of the pandemic, I had lost Kam, my love of ten years, and then my beloved Gram passed away too. I was grieving and searching for anything that might help me feel a little more like myself again.

One day I was talking to one of my best friends, KT, and she told me that she and some friends had jumped into Lake Tahoe. She described it as one of the best natural highs she'd ever experienced.

At that point, I was willing to try just about anything that might shake something loose. So in April on my birthday, I decided I was going into the Atlantic. The water was below 50 degrees, which was plenty cold enough for someone who had spent years thinking winter swimmers had lost their minds.

Don't Stand There Thinking About It

The advice I got was simple: run straight in. Don't hesitate at the edge. And once you're in, go all the way under, come back up and do it again. So that's exactly what I did.

HOLY COWS. I loved it. There was something about doing the thing my brain had spent years telling me I absolutely did not want to do. The cold was shocking, but on the other side of it I felt awake, energized and incredibly proud of myself.

The plunge became a reminder that I could do hard things. I could be uncomfortable and be okay. I could move through grief. I could run directly toward something I'd previously avoided instead of standing at the edge thinking about it forever.

The Asbury Park Double Dippers

After that first plunge, I kept going. Eventually I even started a little local group called the Asbury Park Double Dippers so other people could join me during the colder months. What began as something I once thought was completely ridiculous became something I genuinely looked forward to.

And I think that's why this story has stayed with me. It isn't really about cold water. It's about what can happen when you stop requiring yourself to feel completely ready before you begin. Sometimes you need a detailed plan, or to think something all the way through. But, more often than not you've already done enough thinking and the next useful thing is simply to move.

I've spent more than two decades building CMD, and there have been plenty of decisions along the way that felt much bigger than running into a cold ocean. I've rarely had every answer before taking the first step. Usually, one decision leads to another, you learn something you couldn't have known from the shore, and the path becomes clearer because you're finally moving through it.

So if there's something you've been putting off because the whole thing feels too big, don't start with the whole thing. Find the smallest version of starting and do that.

And, every once in a while, run straight in.

See you on the other side,
Colleen

© Colleen Mauer Designs. All rights reserved.
Published: February 7, 2023
Updated: August 23, 2026