On Listening to Yourself
I think I’m someone who is quite good at listening to myself and going after something if it feels like the right choice — I have a good grasp of doing what feels right for me.
Whether it’s taking a new job, beginning/ending a relationship, moving to a new city, life is full of opportunities to take chances and there is a built-in element of uncertainty, which pushes us to listen to and trust ourselves.
So, how do you know if something is the “right” choice for you?
It’s very possible that the choice you make could be perceived as “worse” than the current scenario you’re in — whether that’s a job, relationship, what have you. But there is also an equally real possibility that it could end up even better! And why shouldn’t it?
I’m a firm believer that you attract and get back what you put out into the world. If you go into something thinking it will be worse, well, it very well might end up that way. It’s all about mindset — go into it thinking that it’s likely to be better and it just might be. And even if things don’t go as expected and it ends up not having been the next best step for you after all, you’ll have learned a ton vs. having remained stagnant by not taking a chance.
I had already started writing this last night, before I read today’s fitting passage from The Daily Stoic (May 17) — it said, “It’s important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement: one never arrives.” Life is a path of ongoing progress and there’s no real end to this self-improvement — we’ll never really achieve a pinnacle of progress.
In order to continually improve, we need to keep taking chances and trust the magic of not-knowing. Sometimes we need to throw ourselves into the deep end, as they say. This feeling of not-knowing can be incredibly uncomfortable and unnerving, but being out of one’s comfort zone is where the “magic” happens. There is strength to be found in doing the hard thing — and spoiler alert: doing the hard thing almost always means growth.
I finished Stephen King’s memoir On Writing this morning (great read, by the way). He writes that, “The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” It’s an idea that’s been recycled many times (the first cut is the deepest, it’s all downhill from here, etc.), but it’s one of those things that’s true — something will naturally be scary before you start because it is unfamiliar and potentially unpredictable, which can make it unsettling for us.
When you have those instances in which things unfold in a way that you’d classify as “wrong” or “bad”, try not to think, “this happened to me”, but rather, “this happened for me” — it happened for you so you could learn something from it. I think this simple change in wording is important in our self-talk — it’s so slight, but so powerful.
This is the mentality around which I try to live my life. We know that nothing is permanent — the good and the bad. So even if you’re in what feels like a downturn, it’s never forever. Soon, things will be looking up again, maybe even sooner than you expect. And when you get there, will you be happier that you took the easier road or the one that brought you lessons and growth?