I was on a retreat with a business owner last week, and he joked that he had seen this on a sign and was going to order it for his office.
I can relate. Because for most of my life, I thought the most useful thing that I could do was think about things. And rethink, and rethink. Even at 4:00 in the morning I was ruminating about the pros and cons of a decision I needed to make.
But then I started to notice something. That after all this rumination, I would often have an insight. Out of the blue. Something that didn’t appear in my analysis, but that I knew somehow, deep in my body, my soul, was true.
And I started asking myself, what if I followed that, rather than the analysis?
Now don’t get me wrong, I would still do the analysis. For example, when I moved from a law firm to a consulting firm, I looked at the pay packages, I thought about partnership, all those things. And I made the move, comfortably that the pay at least looked comparable.
Turned out I was totally wrong about that. I probably would have made a lot more had I stayed in a law firm.
But the move was still the right one, because it really wasn’t about the money. I still made enough over the years, and I did work that resonated a lot more deeply for me.
I found over time that I was generally happier when I chose based on what my body was telling me, my innate sense of knowing, than what a spreadsheet might say.
I still resist, though. I’m all too quick to dismiss something as impractical. I did that with coaching, at least at first. When I was laid off in 2016, I did “know” I didn’t want to go back to a big company as an employee again.
But I thought I would be a consultant, an advisor based on my prior technical expertise. I didn’t even realize that I believed all the statistics about 90 percent of coaches making less than $20,000 a year. That I assumed I could not make what I was making before as a full time coach.
It was fear disguised as logic. As practicality.
It took a good friend saying, “Consulting firm? But you’re so passionate about coaching.”
What she said to me rang true. I knew I had to try.
It was hard, but it also proved true.
What are you overthinking right now? And when you look behind all that, what do you already know to be true?