How to trust and follow your own instinct
Making the right decisions in your career, avoiding distraction and listening to your inner wisdom.
Hi folks
Hope lockdown v2 is going okay and you’re looking after yourselves!
This week we’re exploring the theme of staying true to your own path in your work — how to not get overwhelmed by external influences and options. As is true for most of my content, this ultimately comes back to having greater self-awareness.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally we all get influenced by what other people are doing and perhaps even what their expectations and opinions of us are.
Inspiration and consuming other people’s work serve their own purpose — but today I’m sharing my top tips to follow to stay true to your unique purpose and trust your own instinct and judgment.
There are tools & techniques that can make this process easier and more practical. By now you’ll know I’m all about practical takeaways — so let’s get into it.
And if you’re new here, it’s great to have you, you can subscribe below to receive in-depth answers to commonly asked career questions delivered to your inbox.
In many ways, this topic is about mindfulness.
Mindfulness helps us to understand ourselves better, by noticing how we think, feel, and act in order that we can live with more intention. This act of looking internally before looking externally is key to doing meaningful work. Trusting yourself is allows you to move at pace, stick to the decisions you’ve made, and have greater power in your choices.
Understand the root of your distractions
We all get distracted from time to time. The key is to understand the nature of these distractions because they can present an important clue. Distractions are a form of acting out an internal need we have.
Last month I ran a workshop with Lizzie Reid, the artist & poet who uses the power of self-perception in her work. We covered how there are there are 9 fundamental human needs, these needs remain constant through all cultures and historical time periods. What changes is the way these needs are satisfied.
These needs are for
Freedom
Subsistence
Protection
Affection
Understanding
Participation
Creation
Idleness
Identity
Our distractions offer ways to satisfy these needs. If you’re constantly distracted by your inbox, are you craving participation or attention? Are your triggers based on a lack of creative fulfillment in your work?
The more familiar we become with our needs, the better we can understand our individual behaviors, emotions, and thoughts, and the clearer we can see the gaps these distractions are attempting to satisfy.
Acknowledge your recurring ideas
In the book Big Magic author, Elizabeth Gilbert delves into the components of creativity and having ideas. She describes ideas like visitors who come to you and tap you on the shoulder. Sometimes we ignore said visitor (we’re in the bath or with a friend) but other times we explore them.
When an idea reoccurs Gilbert explains it is looking for its home in you and wants you to nurture it and bring it to life. When we continually ignore a recurring idea it will go off and find its home elsewhere, with someone who is willing to explore it.
So whilst not every idea will be a good idea or something you can explore, take notice of the ones that come frequently and turn them to action before it’s too late.
Filter decisions through the lens of your values.
By knowing your values you can ask yourself ‘to what extent does this option align with my value of X?’
My values are Contribution, Connection, Authenticity, Faith and Impact.
The choices I make ultimately come back to maximizing one of these, and if you don’t have your values outlined yet you can read this post to do so.
Have process-based goals, not just outcome-based ones.
When there is a goal (outcome) you want to hit but are still on the road towards hitting it, then it’s unknown if you are following the right path.
During this time it can be tempting to continually reassess your methods if week-on-week you have not met your goal you may question whether its the right goal, whether it’s possible, or try out different ways to make it happen.
But there are some processes that are almost guaranteed to make a goal a reality. A salesperson holding a certain number of meetings, for example, is a better strategy than reinventing the wheel to hit their target each day.
A process goal for you is anything that, if followed correctly, will likely lead you to the outcome you wish for. Consistency is key and so by creating a process that prioritizes consistency you’ll be more likely to achieve your goal.
Schedule quarterly reflections
Learning what does and doesn’t work for you specifically is key. Rather than going through months or years on auto-pilot, take stock to assess how things are working out for you.
I like the start, continue, stop methodology.
What over the last 3 months is working? Continue these things.
What is not working for me? Stop doing these things.
What could I try that I haven’t been doing yet? Start doing these things.
By tracking these metrics - your energy and enjoyment levels - you’ll grow in self-awareness and be better placed to make the right choices going forward about what to pursue or not.
Tap into your subconscious
Our unconscious mind is sending us signals all of the time, if we could pay attention for long enough to notice or tune out other distractions, we can gain a lot of value from it.
Some tools that might be useful for engaging with your subconscious mind:
Journalling
Meditation
The Artists Way (book + exercises with morning pages)
Write down your dreams
Do a visualization exercise (something I will do with coaching clients)
Record your thoughts liberally
If you keep a log of your thoughts, dreams, beliefs, and values you can regularly come back to what you know to be true about yourself and what you want from your career.
By keeping a home for these musings, digitally or physically, this is something to refer back to when you might otherwise tend to reassess if you are on the right path or during moments of inflection.
My 1-1 coaching clients get a Notion page where we track the progress of their sessions and what needs to happen next. Do you have a document for your career development? What might that need to include and what can you add to it already in the ‘knowns’ section?
Slow down to speed up.
Taking time out to reflect, set goals, write notes, be mindful takes time. Most of my content is about taking time out to do something that will ultimately improve your life and career in the long run.
But know that time spent now upfront is an investment in yourself.
Spending time learning your values, creating clear goals, or checking in with yourself will ultimately speed you up long term. You’ll be faster because you don’t continually reassess your decisions or processes, you’ll be more tuned into your powerful subconscious and less distracted by the wrong things.
That’s it for today, let me know what you learned or want to go deeper on in another post 😊