In honor of the recent episodes of the audio QuitCast, I wrote the following and wanted to post it here as well. Hope it helps some of us process certainty today. <3
Many of us are not wired to easily sort through a lot of potential options, and we get overwhelmed when it appears there’s a “right” and a “wrong” way to make decisions. Especially when we can’t see the “right” quickly.
Additional wrinkle. Everyone has an opinion about how you should run your author career. Almost all of them are wrong.
Why?
Because they’re basing their advice either on faulty assumptions about what’s causing your lack of certainty, or they’re basing their assumptions on what has worked for them. Neither of those are generally relevant to you.
This is why certainty templates can be so helpful. And yes, personality templates are a good place to start (you can look at our work on Strengths, or at Claire Taylor’s Enneagram work for some examples), but not everyone has the bandwidth to learn new systems of classification. So if you don’t have time for that, at least consider these:
- What has worked for you in the past. We try everything everyone else suggests, but we don’t try the thing that has worked for us in the past. If you always work well with external deadlines, for instance, but we don’t like it, we can resist that success pattern, even when we know it will work. But what if the secret to inner peace was just accepting the way you are actually wired and working with it instead of trying to be like someone else? Hmmm.
- What your intuition tells you. All too often, we ignore our intuitive voice (the one that says, “you don’t need this class or program”) because the voice of fear is louder. What happens if we miss out… that’s the question that worries us. But I’m more worried about what happens when we *don’t* miss out, because that’s the damage we’re seeing right now. We all feel like we have to do *everything* and it is burning us out and still not producing the results we want. If we could just make tiny leaps in listening to our intuition when it says, “yes,” or “no,” instead of assuming we can’t possibly be right because we aren’t certain.
- Trauma work and a good therapist. Many of us are making life-and-death decisions in the publishing industry, and we don’t realize it. Our brains are wired for survival, and not happiness. That means our brains are wired to respond to all threat levels as though they might be a matter of survival if things go wrong. If we are being controlled by our trauma responses, and we don’t deconstruct that fear, we’re always going to be beholden to it.
- Accepting that the future is both closed and open. We often ask questions like, “What happens if this book doesn’t succeed” and don’t realize we are attaching life and death to the rhetorical question. The logical answer is, “you’ll deal with it; you have dealt with hard things before, and even if you are disappointed, you can handle disappointment.” We have a hard time reaching the logical answer when we are on the edge of fight or flight, though. Yes, there are some things we can’t change, but nothing is ever final. Always answer your rhetorical questions.
- The thing we want to do. This seems like too easy an answer for people sometimes, but if you could see alignment physically, as a set of factors on a continuum, “wanting to do a thing” always makes us better at it.
There are a lot more, obviously, including personality stuff. But let’s start here. Even if this post convinces one person to do trauma work or to listen to their intuition, it will have done its work.
<3 Becca <3
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