Mindset Memo #3
How will you know if you don’t try?
Thursday, 2 pm, October. My client flops into her chair and sighs. “I just don’t even know what I am doing with my life, I can’t believe it’s already October and I’m still doing the exact same things. I desperately want a change but I don’t know where to start!”
It’s true my client is multi talented, and she could be good at many things, so her struggles to make a decision on what to pursue are logical in the sense of her having choice overload. But there’s another pattern I have heard through our chats that points to her struggles (and possible answers). See if you can spot it.
My client was offered a chance to sell her baked goods at her work Holiday Fair. “But what if no one buys anything, or I just sell a little and all this baking will be a bunch of work for nothing. I just don’t see it being worth it.”
Her hairdresser commented on her beautiful clutch she had sewn, and offered her a space in her salon to sell more of them if she wanted. “That could be really cool, I’ve already bought a ton of extra supplies because I have some other design ideas… but it’s so much work, and I think I’ll get bored of making clutches, plus pricing them is so frustrating for me, meh, not sure it’s for me.”
She talks about how much she enjoys drawing and painting, how she gets lost in flow, and how so many people in her life love her art. “Yeah, my dad was an artist, and he always told me, ‘Just don’t be an artist, you won’t make any money’. And it is so time consuming. I can go months without making any art ‘cause I don’t have the energy after my day job, and I just don’t think my art would sell, it’s not really marketable. Maybe for kids, so like, children’s books, but that market is already over-saturated.”
These are just the obvious opportunities she has mentioned, there are many more subtle options that have met with the same fate: dead on arrival. Did you see the pattern? She immediately comes up with plenty of reasons why an opportunity won’t work for her, and talks herself out of even considering trying. From a logical standpoint she may well be correct. She’s not being unreasonable in her predictions. But, from a coaching standpoint, she is also talking herself out of testing out what she wants to do and will most likely continue to be stuck in her head (and the same, unsatisfying life), finding reasons not to try anything new.
The, “what if it does work out?” approach from Mindset Memo #2, helped to open up more possibilities, and she could see she was talking herself out of even trying, but her fears were still too strong. She couldn’t quite believe in it actually working out completely. She just wanted to get herself to try, not to figure out her whole entire life, or how an opportunity might or might not work out, but just to take the first step or two toward building something new.
In her next breath, she mentioned how she keeps coming back to becoming a coach, how she loves the idea of it and does it naturally with her mentees already, but it’s so much time and money to get certified, and she is worried that she won’t get enough clients or be able to run a business, and… And in that moment she stopped, chuckled and with a wry smile and an eye roll said, “but how will I even know unless I try?”
Reader, that person was me. And reader, that question carried me through signing up and completing coach training, and beyond. To this day, when my inner critic rears it’s head and starts naysaying what I’m trying to create, trying to get me to give up and return to what is comfortable and known, I flash it a smile, shrug my shoulders and retort, “yeah, but we won’t know unless we try!” And I gleefully take my next step forward.