Trusting Myself
“Maybe, you were right! Maybe you should trust yourself that you’ll know when the timing is right.”
I have a good friend, also a colleague, who told me this recently. I needed to hear it.
Earlier today, I was listening to my favorite podcast, All the Hacks, and they were speaking about the psychology of change, which I find fascinating. They said, people will ruminate about something, spending lot of mental energy on it. They might think they’re solving a problem but really, they’re just going around and around and not solving anything. The podcaster said, “It’s important in those situations to take a step back and consider, how will you feel about this problem you’re ruminating about in 5 hours, 5 days, 5 months, 5 years? This will give you some perspective on the situation.” I really identified with this.
It’s Ready, It’s Ready… But I’m Not
I have been working hard on preparing my new app for its launch. I gave myself a deadline of November and hit all the milestones I wanted to hit. Truthfully, it is ready now. But I still don’t want to release it…which has been causing me a lot of embarrassment. I’ll be on shift with others and they will ask me, “Is it out? Is it ready?” I just don’t feel ready to put my work out there, to expose myself to a larger audience.
I was speaking with my colleague, the founder of the birth center, about this last week. She is trained as a midwife. I’ve found that people who are in healthcare, but who are not physicians, have a different kind of training that allows them to listen a bit more closely. (This may be a generalization but it has been my personal experience.) I feel freer to speak openly and honestly with them about how I’m doing. I don’t feel the need to come across as perfect, tough, able to make it through 24-hour shifts like they’re a walk in the park, as I might with other physicians.
In this conversation, I shared with her, “The app is ready, but I don’t know why I can’t hit go on it. I’ve got all the validation I need, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” And that’s when she made the comment at the top of this post. “Maybe the timing isn’t right, and you should trust that. It will be ready when it’s ready.”
Listening to My Own Voice and Ignoring that Nagging One
This set off a lightbulb in me, to stop doubting myself and beating myself up. I don’t need to succumb to the voices from outside of me telling me, “It’s not fast enough, it’s not good enough, it’s gonna fail, people are gonna judge me…” NO! I’m in the driver’s seat here. It’s my company, it’s my life, it’s my app, and I will release it when I feel like it’s ready. We always need a person in our corner who gives us that different perspective on ourselves. Who reminds us that the critical nagging voice we’re hearing isn’t our own voice and we don’t have to listen to it.
Listening to one’s own feelings is generally considered “woo-woo” in the medical field. When I worked at Emory, my colleagues would call me the “crunchy’ ob-gyn. I think this was because I cared about my patients enough to sit with them when they cried, about chronic pain or postpartum depression. My colleagues called them the “Braden specials.” I even have my own ingrained physician resistance to this approach. But the human part of me thinks, yes, this is what we should be doing in medicine, treating the whole person and not just their condition. And I still feel that way. If it turns out that being “crunchy” just means I’m willing to listen and validate people’s feelings, then crunch away.
Trusting my feelings is equally tied to the vacation I just took. I always feel the pressure to work more, to not take breaks, to be tough and “always on.” But I know that when I allow myself to take breaks, put up an away message, and ignore non-urgent text messages, I am a better person. My creative side takes over; I actually become more productive with my ideas for my business. Trusting this part of myself—the creative, feeling, human side—is just as important to my success as the logical, analytical, problem-solving side. So I will keep being crunchy and listening to myself. I will keep listening to people’s feelings. This is important to my business, but it’s also important to my humanity.
Dr. Braden’s Recommendation
This week, I’m plugging All the Hacks again. Always a fascinating look at how to do things, and also, why we do them. Check out this most recent episode, “Why Change is Hard and How to Make It Your Advantage” from Feb. 18.
