on being ready
is there really such a thing?
“Sometimes a thing can seem an impossible leap, then when you do it, you find it’s just been a little step all along.” — Joe Abercrombie, the Heroes
A question that has been coming up a lot lately—posed by me to myself, by those around me to themselves, by me to others, by others to me—is this rather taunting, confidence-distorting, action-stifling question of: are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?
By interrogating this question each time it comes up, I’ve realized that this elusive, rather mysterious notion of “being ready” might just be the most well-disguised psychological block of all time. It’s this idea that one day, you will receive a magical stamp of approval, delivered directly to you by some mysterious external force, telling you that you are now Ready For The Thing. Interestingly though, this has never happened to me or anyone else I know. So, what exactly are we all waiting for?
I’ve never “felt ready” for the things that scared me—things that pushed me to grow in a direction that was true, meaningful, and worthwhile. Every time I’ve done something that came from a deep place within, something that felt out of reach, intimidating or risky, I always felt rather un-ready for it. But what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing. Getting into a serious relationship. Quitting my job to focus on writing. All of these were intimidating yet alluring tasks I managed to leap at before I felt ready. And all of them were tasks that opened up doors that I could never have anticipated, sending me into paths I only realized I was ready for once I was on them.
“Where you fear is, there is your task.” — Carl Jung
There was a time where the idea of not being ready made something more seductive to me. More empowering. Others not thinking I was ready was a challenge I liked. My brain did this quick calculation where: if I fail, it’s okay, because what do I have to lose? If it doesn’t work, I’m exactly where everyone is trying to convince me I am, but with more information about myself. And if it works, well, it works.
Doubt from others gave me this sort of egoless permission slip to try. But somewhere along the way, my relationship to “being ready” shifted. Perhaps the doubt from others crept inwards and crowded out the stubborn audacity I possessed as a child that masked doubts as challenges I wanted to disprove. I started buying into this notion that I needed to “be ready” before I start, instead of continuing to challenge the notion that some arbitrary measure of ready-ness was an instructive signal at all.
This invisible, poorly defined prerequisite began to block me from doing things I felt deeply called to but had never done before, because I felt like I couldn’t do them until I achieved some unidentifiable hurdle indicating I would succeed. The problem was: this ready-ness prerequisite didn’t actually exist. It was an imagined criteria that no one could grant me except myself. The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.
ready as a state of mind
The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to. You can say to yourself yourself “I am ready.” You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking. Because what could be a more accurate way to evaluate whether someone is ready than observing whether they try?
trapped by the mind
I have tried to write about many things these last few weeks, but I have discarded all of them, because—I told myself—the pieces weren’t “ready” or I wasn’t “ready” to write them. But as I write these words out, I see these thoughts for what they are: limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need. Any idea we conceive of is one we can enact. No further analysis necessary. All that is left to measure ready-ness is action.
fear as self-preservation
There is something to be learned or at least observed from the fearful part of your mind trying to convince you that you’re not ready. It is a well-intentioned part of you that wants to protect you and itself. It has good intentions, but flawed context. It should be approached gently. Because that part of you isn’t trying to sabotage you, it isn’t trying to kill your potential or be cruel in some way. It is trying to do what it perceives to be its job: to protect you from social rejection, from failure, from risk.
It is up to you to approach that part of yourself softly—to comfort and soothe it, to make it feel seen and safe. To acknowledge its fears and contextualize them. To say to yourself: yes, we might mess up, or be rejected, or not be the best. Is that okay, though? Can we live with that? Can we survive it? The truth is that with most fears, we certainly can. The fears of modernity are usually about social perception and external judgement. But many of these fears are unfounded: others often admire things we do before we think we are “ready” more than they judge or criticize them. And even when that isn’t true, who really cares? Isn’t the metric of success that matters most making ourselves proud? Living a life aligned with our values? Actualizing our unique potential? Even if they judge, scold, or reject us—might that be… okay? Might that be worth the risk of doing what feels right to us?
on self-permissioning
Asking for permission is something we learn as soon as we can talk: asking our teachers for permission to go to the bathroom during class, asking friends at recess to join their game, asking a parent to sign a permission slip to let us go on a field trip. Getting permission meant receiving a stamp of approval saying: you are ready to do this.
But once we leave the world of institutions, permissioning shifts dramatically. Our life becomes a series of checkpoints demanding self-permission-ing—that is: allowing yourself to do the thing. Or: telling yourself that you are ready. If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now. That you can just decide that you are ready.
what are we so scared of?
Something
said in a seminar he recently hosted about building a service business is that there are typically two major internal blocks when it comes to self-permission-ing (that is: giving yourself permission to do something that only you can give yourself permission to do). Most people are either: (1) afraid to do a new thing wrong, or (2) afraid to look weird.I appreciated the simplicity of this observation—because under these two sub-7-word phrases, sat all of the reasons I ever felt I wasn’t “ready” to do something. And it is precisely when I embraced those fears and did it anyway—when I stopped thinking and started doing—that I shed the fear that was keeping me where I was.
As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.
on gently embracing fear
I was listening to an epic podcast episode where Rick Rubin and John Mayer are doing what can only be described as channeling source for two hours straight, and something John Mayer said on this topic pierced right through me (paraphrasing):
“Everything changed for me when I realized that I could take the anxious, scared 11 year old version of myself up on the stage with me. I could take his hand, listen to his fears, and say: yeah, there’s a lot of people out there. yeah, it might be a bit scary to perform in front of them. yeah, we might mess up. but it’s all good. we’ll be okay. it’ll be fun actually! want to come out there and join me? Everything changed when I realized I could bring him up there and sing with him at my side.”
I love this frame: include fear in the act of conquering it. Do what you’re scared of alongside the anxious feeling instead of shoving it down or rejecting it. Meet yourself where you’re at. Approach the part of you that is fearful, pick it up gently, put it on your shoulders, then do the thing. Show them (you) that: hey, this isn’t so bad!
don’t think!
Ray Bradbury also has a great bit about the danger of allowing thinking to get in the way of doing. In his words:
“The intellect is a great danger to creativity, because you use it to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of trusting your own basic truth: who you are, what you are, what you want to be.
I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now, which reads: Don’t Think! You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel. Thinking is supposed to be a corrective in our lives—it’s not supposed to be the center of our lives. Living is supposed to be the center. Being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around us holding us together like the skin holds our blood and flesh in. Our skin is not our way of life. Our way of life is the blood coming through our veins: the ability to sense and to feel to know. The intellect doesn’t help you very much there.”
Bradbury’s perspective is simple yet illuminative: when you go out to do the thing, don’t think. Don’t wonder if you’re good enough or if you’re ready. Just start. And by doing—by being willing to mess up, be embarrassed, be judged, fail, look weird—you’ll have proved to yourself that you are capable. That you were prepared. That none of those worries really mattered. That after all, you are ready. You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.
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Related essays you might enjoy: find novelty through commitment, getting out of a funk, you might disappoint people (and that’s okay) and humility vs. hubris. You can also find me on Twitter for my daily thoughts.
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“ready or not, here i come!”
to not ask for permission and just do it is terrifying, but also exhilarating. though this may perhaps impact the stability of a society (which is probably why we are ingrained to not do things impulsively) -- but we can worry about the society later ;)
such a nice read ✨
just commented without thinking twice about was I ready to. 😉