Today's Challenge:
Trusting intuition and making decisions based on it is the most important activity of the creative artist and entrepreneur. If you are facing (and fearing) a difficult life decision, ask yourself these three questions:
1) "What are the costs of inaction?" I find it can be helpful to fight fear with fear. Fears of acting are easily and immediately articulated by our "lizard brains" (thanks Seth) e.g. what if I fail? what if I look stupid? If you systematically and clearly list the main costs of inaction, they will generally overshadow your immediate fears.
2) "What kind of person do I want to be?" I've found this question to be extremely useful. I admire people who act bravely and decisively. I know the only way to join their ranks is to face decisions that scare me. By seeing my actions as a path to becoming something I admire, I am more likely to act and make the tough calls.
3) "In the event of failure, could I generate an alterative positive outcome?" Imagine yourself failing to an extreme. What could you learn or do in that situation to make it a positive experience? We are generally so committed to the results we seek at the outset of a task or project that we forget about all the incredible value and experience that comes from engaging the world proactively, learning, and improving our circumstances as we go along.
Today's entry:
I'm not sure these are the kind of questions you can answer in an essay. They're the kind you have to ask yourself every day, over and over until they're so automatic that they have a chance at fighting the deep-seated doubts and fears they're working against.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite – if a bit unorthodox – psychologists, Albert Ellis. He talks lot about "catastrophizing", when we blow fear out of proportion, create a chain of events in our minds that leads to disaster. The problem is, we get so good at it that we start writing catastrophe scripts for ourselves, until it happens without our even having to have to do it out loud.
There are a lot of ways to try to stop these runaway trains of thought, but for me the best way is to say it out loud. What will happen if this project doesn't turn out the way I want it to? I'll feel like a failure, and let people down. They'll hate me forever and I'll lose all my clients. My clients will be so angry that they'll train an army of ninjas to kill me in my sleep.
Eventually, the fear sounds as absurd as it is.
Of course, this takes practice, too. Fear, however irrational, is incredibly powerful. Most of us have been drafting those negative scripts for decades. Writing Act 2 can take a while, but it's worth the effort.