Have you ever felt so completely terrified of making a mistake or choosing the wrong path that you were completely paralysed? It’s called Analysis Paralysis and It happens to me all of the time. I get all worked up about tiny decisions, like what stationery I’m going to buy or in what order I’m going to do the items on my to-do list. I get paralysed by anxiety about the decisions and end up just standing still. This may seem utterly ridiculous but I think it gives an insight into some of the problems you face when following an unconventional career path.
Quitting the job that doesn’t fulfill us actually isn’t the toughest part, though lord knows it’s tough enough. A big life change brings momentum with it, a big swell of energy that carries you along…..for a while. The really hard part comes later, when the wave has thrown you onto the beach and your new life awaits. Only you don’t know where the hell you are or how to get to where you’re going. Suddenly the stakes seem incredibly high and you convince yourself that the world as you know it will end if you don’t create the perfect website, or get the perfect logo. Far easier then to just wait until you’re sure about the direction you want to go in. Only, here’s the thing, the certainty never comes. You never know. There are certainly times when the energy is flowing and you know you’re doing what you were meant to do and that carries you on for a little longer but they are rare gems. Most of the time you feel lost and anxious.
Here’s a thought. What if that anxiety was just energy that demonstrates how much this matters to you? What if it was just misplaced excitement? I know that I spent years in a job that didn’t really fulfill me and I never had a single sleepless night over the minor details. I just didn’t care enough to worry about that stuff. This worry is proof that I care. That it matters. That I’m on the right track. It’s actually a sign from deep inside my being that I’m headed the right way. So many people ask how they can find their passion or discover what it is that they want to do and I think fear and anxiety are a really good sign that you’re moving the right way. You’re learning something new for goodness sake. You may not be able to do it at first but you learned to walk, you learned to talk, to tie your shoelaces, to tell the time. You can learn to do this too.
So anxiety is necessary, but it’s ultimately not helpful and managing it seems to be the key to success. Can you handle the discomfort of worrying about whether that stationery choice could end your career? Can you handle the discomfort of not knowing in what order to tackle the items on your to do list and not knowing whether you’ve even got the right things on your list? Can you handle the discomfort of knowing that you could do everything right and you could still fail, for reasons completely beyond your control?
I don’t know about you but, for me, much of the anxiety stems from worry about making the wrong decision, or taking a wrong turn. Eleven years ago last week, I made the biggest single wrong decision of my life. I married the wrong person and moved across the Atlantic, largely because I was afraid to stop something that had taken on a momentum of its own. It felt easier to hide and ignore it, than to do something that terrified me and risk being criticised and judged by everyone I knew. Of course, it ended very badly and the repercussions have been enormous, spanning years of my life. I do find myself wondering from time to time whether walking away from a marriage in the first week, after your parents have paid for the whole wedding would have been any worse. There’s no way to know but I do think that it would not have been the end of the world. What I understand now and didn’t then is that it was a choice available to me. I could have done it and I would have survived. Just as I survived making the other choice.
The lesson learned? You can’t get it wrong. You can’t mess it up. Sometimes there is no good option and sometimes there is no bad option. It doesn’t really matter which way you go. Just know that you can go in the direction that terrifies you….if you want to. And you will survive.
Of course all of this sounds great in theory but we all have days where we just want to go foetal over whether a picture frame should be black or kind of a dark brown. But the only thing that works for me is to just make a choice anyway. Get over the obstacle and move on to the next terrifying choice. Making a choice, any choice, is so powerful and in most cases the benefits you get from that momentum far outweigh the potential downside.
I’m now off to purchase a greetings card display stand that may or may not be perfect for me, that may or may not have the right number of slots, that may or may not fit into my car or onto my stall, that may or may not be the right colour or the right design…..and I’m okay with that.