One of my clients came to her session with a familiar question. It’s one that typically comes up when someone is making a gutsy change in their lives. Especially, if that gutsy change involves committing to their BIG IDEA.
The question is this: How do I know FOR SURE that my idea is worth pursuing?
Or, more accurately:
How do I know FOR SURE that the passion I feel around this idea is real; that it can be trusted; and that I should pursue this?
While there is certainly research we can conduct to determine which of our ideas is best to pursue from various economic or business standpoints, I’ve noticed that when this question is initially asked, all the logical, statistical validation in the world won’t make a difference in helping us move forward.
At least, not until the underlying saboteur is addressed.
The underlying saboteur is, of course, different for everyone. To one person, the saboteur might be saying, “What if you fail?” While to another, it’s saying, “Nothing you do ever works.” And to still someone else, something like, “Someone’s probably already thought of this.” For more on this last one, read the previous post.
But no matter what our saboteur’s mantra is, its end game is to stop us in our tracks; to plant the seed of doubt; to make us doubt ourselves so that we’ll stay safe.
If we don’t do the personal work necessary to navigate this saboteur, we stay stuck, unable to move forward with our ideas.
But rather than focusing directly on navigating the saboteur in this article, I want to present a philosophy we can choose to adopt around the value of our own ideas that I’ve found helps me and my clients exponentially. It’s this:
We would not feel the spark we feel inside, if our passion was not real and right; AND we would not have thought of our BIG IDEA if there wasn’t a place for it in the world, including an audience waiting for it.
I don’t have any proof that this is true except from my own experience of how the universe works and from the personal stories of countless creators. Yet, there is something so deeply resonant about this philosophy for me – a gut knowing.
The spark, the passion, it’s the sign we are on the right, not the wrong, path.
I find that, often, just remembering this philosophy is enough. With it in mind, I understand something about my own power and genius that enables me to trust my own ideas and move forward fiercely.
If our initial doubt is tackled from this internal saboteur level first, it also seems to allow us to conduct the practical research that’s often also needed when launching an idea with a sense of lightness, objectivity and even joy – rather than with desperation.
At that point, the questions we begin asking get much more interesting and useful; and about as far away from How do I know if I can trust myself? as you can get.
To believing we have ideas for a reason.