Exploring the unknown.

Living in abundance not scarcity;

Three months ago I handed my notice in, without another job to go too because exploring the unknown isn’t new to me when it comes to my career. I think I’m ok about not needing to know what is going to happen next and finding my way through that. Despite this, doubt has always crept in which has sometimes led to me not making the right choices because of panic and underlying fear. But I’ve been doing work around the area of intentions and manifestation recently and this time decided to try a little experiment and set intentions around work, life and the book and live in the energy of abundance not scarcity instead.

It worked.  After a few weeks of looking, yesterday I received a job offer from a company aligned with what I wanted and I start mid-November, a date I had also set as one of my intentions. Maybe there is something in this. 

But when it comes to my book and content creation, the unknown feels a lot scarier. Not sure why, maybe because it’s so personal. It is literally me, exposed and vulnerable.  Do you feel the same?  As humans, we like to control or at least pre-empt future outcomes but there’s no guarantee when it comes to the creative process,  if this process has goals and ambitions attached to it.  We simply can’t know what the result will be from doing A, B or C in one year, five years or ten years time but it is only by exploring the unknown that you can ever hope to grow, acquire new skills and experiences and achieve things you can’t even imagine right now.  You can also fail and the possibility of that, is the scary part I think.

In my last post Pain Points, I talked about how I’d finally gotten my arse into gear and started posting video content on my YouTube channel. When setting up this channel, I had thought long and hard on what I wanted it to be about and knew I didn’t just want to focus on the book or my writing journey.  I wanted it to be more general, focused on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can’t do, which hold us back and stop us from living our best lives because these are things I personally struggled with for many years. I wanted to share my stories so I could help those struggling with the same issues.

On the other hand, I thought this website and blog would be the space I would focus on my experiences as a first-time writer, managing a full-time career and family, like so many of us trying to navigate this particular journey and of the highs and lows of exploring the unknown.

Trust;

It took me a while to get to this place and only then did I feel comfortable enough to share my video content with a trusted circle of close friends for their feedback, to see if it made sense.

One friend in this circle used to be my business coach. He was and is a coach who works with purpose, who like an archeologist, coaches by digging deep into a person’s psyche and pulls out all the unconscious behaviours and thought processes that hinder our ability to move forward, to bring it into the light. To be seen, to be worked through, to be cleared.  We worked together until the end of last year when I felt ready to explore the unknown by myself. To see whether I could do the heavy lifting and trust my own intuition in this space.

So that’s what I’ve spent this year doing. Trying to navigate spaces that are uncomfortable, unfamiliar and necessary.  So when his feedback was, ‘I don’t get it’ my immediate thought was oh no. All the time I have spent trying to get it right, only for it not to make sense to him didn’t feel great. But then I really listened to what he was saying.  He thought that both things, my website and blog and the YouTube channel needed to be aligned. It all needed to be about my book and my journey of how I got here to this point in my life. He didn’t get what I was trying to do on YouTube by talking about things that weren’t related.

I didn’t necessarily like what he was saying but I took the time to pause and really let it sink in. The thing is, he could be totally right. He probably is. But I also have to follow my intuition and do what feels right for me. So I went back to the reason of why I started the year the way I did, which was not to use someone else as a crutch, to have more belief in myself, my capabilities and abilities. To own it basically.

Conclusion;

I’ve decided that he is right but that I am also right. That there must be a way of having both channels sit side by side, not necessarily doing exactly the same thing but executing it in a way that doesn’t feel completely separate. It’s an interesting challenge.

How have you explored the unknown and dealt with feedback which maybe wasn’t what you wanted to hear but you knew to be right?  Please do leave a comment or just say hi, I’d love to hear from you.

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