Newsletter #31

Full of Doubt? A postcard from the edge of giving up.

Hi there,

Whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, you’re making creative decisions all the time. Should you go take this job or that job as you progress your career? Should you go this way or that way with this project? Shall I commit myself to this relationship or not? These are creative decisions. Some are bigger than others, but they all impact your future to some degree.

Most of the time we’re pretty good at making these decisions. We know intuitively which direction to go. But at other times we get stuck. We get some negative feedback, or things start feeling difficult. We lose faith in the thing we’ve been building. And we’re at a loss what to do because we find ourselves full of doubt.

Not knowing what to do feels terrible! And a big part of us - possibly the biggest part of us - will deal with the feeling by wanting to give up.

These moments of paralysis and resignation tend to happen in the middle of things. Mid-career. Mid-project. Mid-relationship. You're not at the beginning anymore. It’s been running long enough to feel substantial and important. And it feels like there may be potential for it to go further. But you really don’t know in which direction. And somewhere in that middle stretch, the conviction that got you started in the first place has gone conspicuously quiet.

What you’re left with is a big puddle of uncertainty. It feels cloudy. It feels muddy. And it feels like it’s attacking you personally. Blaming you for getting yourself in to this mess. Ridiculing you for ever thinking you were cut out for this. Cheering you on to run and hide and give it all up.Why am I doing this? What's the point? Was I ever really capable of pulling this off?

That's doubt. And when it arrives, the initial response is to feel down about the feedback you’re getting. To dwell on the lack of progress you’re making. To give up and hope it will go away.The next natural instinct is to make a knee-jerk reaction. Consult Chat GPT. Make a snap decision. Go into compliant mode based on other people’s advice. Choose the safe job because the family needs the money. Redesign the marketing materials because the boss likes blue. Stick with the boyfriend because your parents like him. We make a decision, we pivot our lives based on a comment made by someone else. Anything to make that heavy feeling of doubt go away and get you moving again. At least you’re not stuck. Sometimes that works. For a while. But often it doesn't. That’s because it pulls the authentic ‘you’ and the authentic ‘thing’ further away from each other. Only you and your career, your project, and your relationship know what’s right for each other. No one else.So what do you do with that terrible feeling of doubt?

Firstly, you bring to mind that the feeling of doubt isn't the problem. It’s just a feeling. But what tends to happen the moment that feeling of doubt arrives is that we start measuring. Against what we imagined things ‘should’ look like by now. Against what seems to be happening for others. Against the way we ‘think’ the world should be.

We hand our sense of progress and ‘rightness’ over to external signals. Signals that are put out into the world by others that, in all liklihood, don’t match reality. We see people enjoying fantastic new jobs and fantastic pay rises on LinkedIn. We see amazing new projects popping up on Facebook. And the perfect relationships all over Instagram. When we measure our own internal reality against these external representations there’s only one verdict that will ever come back… my life is shit compared to them. I’m in the middle of this career, this project, this relationship. I don’t know how to make it be as fantastic as all these other people’s stuff. I’m useless. What’s the point?

So the doubt grows. You lose faith in your ability to move forward. And gradually, what made your ‘thing’ so great in the first place starts to fade.

What’s important when you’re stood in front of this seemingly immovable bolder of doubt is that this isn't a reflection of the quality of what you're building. It's a reflection of where you're looking for confirmation of quality. External signals — social media posts, other people’s opinions, your boss’s reaction, your family’s enthusiasm (or lack of) — are the reflections. They are echos. They're not the source. They are not the inner essence of the thing you are creating. And navigating by external echo rarely gets you where you actually want to go. You have to tap into that inner essence to get it back on track.

Doubt, when you're willing to look at it honestly, is really just asking you a simple question. Not is this thing good enough? but are you willing to trust your own judgement again?

That's a harder question to sit with. But it's the right one.

Going back to the thing as you first experienced and understood it — back to what lit up your career, your project idea, your relationship - is how you combat doubt. Back to the times before the other people’s opinions began to reshape it. Back before you compared it to what other people had. Back before the fear crept in.

This isn't about being completely ignoring what people are genuinely telling you. It's about getting the order right. Reconnecting the essence of ‘you’ with the essence of ‘it’. What this thing is actually for, what benefits and joy it could bring to the world, and what it genuinely needs from you. Once you dig in to those aspects of your doubt, those inner qualities that only you can know, then you’re in a much better position to decide what to do next.

That inward shift doesn't dissolve the doubt. But it changes its meaning. Doubt as a verdict on your ability to make things work perfectly, according to others’ (potentially false) accounts, feels heavy and judgemental. No wonder it feels paralysing. But doubt can be read as a signal and something you can work with. Use it as a sign, not that you were wrong to begin with, or something is inherently wrong now, but as a sign that something inside you is being invited to grow.

The idea is still there. Your career, your project, your relationship is still alive and kicking. That hasn't changed. It's not waiting for better external conditions. It’s not calling for the outside world to tell it what to do. To rise up and meet some unattainable proclaimed standard.

It's waiting for a decision. From you.

A simple, quiet decision to trust yourself. To have faith in your own inner compass. To know that the next right action, made from the heart not other people’s opinions or standards, will open up the next right idea to lead you and your ‘thing’ to the pace you’re both meant to be.

A decision. From you. That's where it starts. That’s where the doubt starts to end.

Until next time,

Simon