Can I let you in on a little secret?

I often talk about how clarity comes from taking the action. It’s a mantra that my mentor Jenny Shih uses in her work, and I’ve adopted it as my own.

As humans, we have this tendency to want things to be “perfect” and “right”, before we do anything about a problem or situation or goal or project.

The hard truth is that you can’t know everything in advance.

There’s no such thing as perfect information.

And even scarier, the only way to get that information is to take action.

So that you learn what worked, what didn’t, what had the intended result, what didn’t produce the intended results, what you’ll do differently next time.

So that little secret I mentioned…

… almost everything you do in life is just a guess.

Yes, there are best guesses, targeted guesses, really educated guesses, but we can’t know with 100% certainty what’s going to happen each and every instance in our life (well, except things like 2+2=4, but then, is it really? who decided that? Ok, that’s another conversation for a different day).

And then, the other half of that secret… nothing in this life is one and done.

Everything that you’re doing in your business, the decisions you’re making, even if you decide to come up with the most bang-on, awesome offer that every client that you’ve ever worked with is going to LOVE and have their minds completely blown.

Yep, even that stellar idea is likely going to change somewhere down the road.

Something’s going to happen, maybe you’ll work with dozens of clients in this exact way and realize a new way to make that offer even better, so you tweak your package.

Or, you decide that you no longer feel the drive to serve clients in that way, so you drop it completely and shift your business direction.

The only way that you can have that level of clarity is by taking the action, to go find those clients and work with them and gather that knowledge of what needs to happen next.

Nothing is actually set in stone that we’re doing here, in business and in life.

Everything is fluid.

Be open and receptive to the action that you need to take and the clarity that is going to come with it.

Instead of resisting the idea that you don’t have perfect information, grab your confidence and take action.

The flip side is staying stuck in where you are in your business right now.

When you feel that internal tension of “I wish I had all the answers so they would know what to do,” the best idea is to STOP and simply take an action, the very next step in front of you. Because that step will inform the next action and the next action and the next action to get you where you want to go.

And when you think, “Oh, I don’t have to get it right this one time, I just need to get moving,” all the pressure fades away. Poof.

In an instant, you’ve given yourself permission to mess it up.
To get it gloriously right.
To change your mind.
To fail up.
To pivot directions.
To have curious experiments.
To course-correct.
To have it be wildly successful.
To do it exactly the way that you need to on any given day.

 

Photo by Estee Janssens on Unsplash