Outsourcing our instincts
Looking for trust in all the wrong places
Hey friends,
It’s been a while.
I wish I could tell you I’d been on exciting adventures or doing good things - like volunteering back in Nepal, where I lived in a tent on a mountaintop with no access to running water, internet, or electricity.
Every day, we’d trek into town and exhaust muscles we didn’t even know we had demolishing earthquake-damaged buildings. Every night, we’d tell each other stories as we cooked together and washed our hair, clothes, and dishes in buckets, before hitchhiking into the big city at weekends.
Honestly, those were the days.
I loved not having easy access to the internet. I loved how we played games and read books in our downtime, rather than scrolling. I loved that when we watched movies or TV, it was very intentional. Like how, every week, the local coordinator would head off down the mountain to download the newest episode of Game of Thrones on his phone, and then host a viewing party.
I even loved how I didn’t know the first thing about demolishing buildings before I started, but how natural it felt to hold a crowbar by the end of my time there.
Life felt simple, back then. We had a job to do and tools to help us. If we had a question or didn’t know how to do something, we asked. Trust was built and earned, not bought. We weren’t defined by our past or who we were “back home”, but all equal in the moment, united in a common purpose and a desire to help others.
While I’d go back in a heartbeat if I could - and one day, probably will - life seems to be taking me on a very different path these days. A path that seems to change by the day, even if the destination doesn’t.
These past few months, along with working, studying hard, and recovering from an injury that is taking a lot longer than hoped to heal, I’ve also found myself totally exhausted from constantly trying to figure out what’s up from down in an age when it feels like it’s becoming harder than ever to know what’s real.
And I'm not just talking about AI. Although obviously that's its own beast. I more mean that, when everything feels all kinds of upside down and all over the place, it can be hard to know where to focus your energies.
After more than a decade of working online, I’ve been finding myself pretty bored with it all. Bored of competing with AI for writing gigs, bored of having to write the articles I do land. Bored of not having everything figured out with my business. Bored of being constantly bombarded by people telling me they have the missing piece, and I just need this or that.
Bored of believing them. Bored of feeling like something is broken. Like I just need to heal my way back to wholeness.
I’m not sure if it’s the studying narrative therapy - which has definitely cracked open how I’m looking at everything - working these weddings, or going back to running in-person writing workshops again for the first time in three years, but something big feels like it’s shifting.
It’s shifting how I’m showing up - with a bigger emphasis on community, connection, conversation, and more experimental creativity. Like, how I’ve started using more “out-there” fictional prompts and writing games as a way to tap into imagination and exploration in my online writing circles, rather than the more journalling-style prompts I used to use.
“Finding new ways to look at old problems” is quite a big part of all the work I do with others, but even more so now I’m learning to hold that same mirror up for myself. It’s fascinating how these fictional prompts are giving me answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. Even though I come up with the prompts, I still write and share my answers with the group, and they always take me to unexpected places.
Like how, this month’s circle led to me having one of those “Why not me?” moments, along with the realisation that I get almost as much joy from the learning of things as I do from the doing… Well, most of the time, anyway.
Yesterday, I ended up putting it all into practice. Last week, I got in my first-ever car accident - just a little fender bender, fortunately, no one was hurt - and managed to do some damage to my trusty little car. Rather than going the insurance route, I decided to try to fix it myself.
(Under qualified supervision, of course... It helps when your bf is a mechanic!)
After spending all week lamenting and replaying it in my mind - despite getting straight onto playing Tetris once I managed to limp home - I decided to take action. I figured out the parts we needed and teed up a few options on Facebook Marketplace, spent a whole morning driving around to the different wreckers - and getting a “crash” course in watching them triple-stack cars using a forklift, and then having to awkwardly get up there to remove the parts - and then headed to the workshop.
Ed gave me the tools, told me what to do, and put me to work. While at first I was a bit nervous - I didn’t want to make it any worse than it was! - It didn’t take too long for me to get into it, or for us to find our way into working side-by-side.
By the time we were done, the car looked good as new. We’d also had some good chats, learned some things, and turned a shitty situation into one that made me actually feel pretty good about myself.
It made me think about those days in Nepal and how good it felt to just… get the job done.
Working weddings has been quite similar. Pretty much as soon as I stepped behind the bar, decades of experience came flooding back, reminding me of base-level competencies I’d totally forgotten I had. After years of tight-rope walking on the edge of my comfort zone, I realised it didn’t have to always be this hard.
The irony that I tell my 1:1 clients this kind of thing all the time is absolutely not lost on me.
I can support others to find ease in their business, take a step back, find those other doorways, shine flashlights into cobweb-filled corners and figure out what’s going wrong, but still struggle to hold that same mirror up for myself. I am my own worst client in so many ways, knowing what needs to change, but then either hitting it so hard I don’t sleep for three weeks and burn out, or putting off replying to emails for weeks.
…Or even writing them.
Hence why it’s been a little while.
I had a lot of figuring out to do, and it was the kind of figuring out that you can only do when you have some space to do it. The kind of figuring out that came from a conversation I had with someone about how different my 1:1 and community spaces are from my emails and the way I write. How they’re all about championing everyone else’s stories, and how my emails are all about my own.
The kind of figuring out that made me realise that I’m ready to take things in a new direction. That everything I’ve done and shared and said has helped get me to where I am, but that, like the gig in Nepal or the car, when the job is done, it’s okay to move on. It’s okay to try something new.
It’s okay to take all the skills you’ve learned and use them somewhere else.
Like going back to bartending, turning my crowbar skills towards fixing cars, turning writing circles into fictional experiments, rather than journalling prompts. Like adding everything I’m learning in my narrative therapy course into my 1:1 work.
Like going back to running in-person workshops, rather than just doing online ones. Like being more interested in asking people questions about what they think makes them a good travel writer, and what they have to add to the conversation, rather than teaching them about “good” travel writing.
It’s interesting how, after doing all this, I’ve also discovered that the best way of building trust doesn’t come from constantly being on that tightrope, pushing your limits, obsessing over the gap between where you are and where you want to be, or listening to people who tell you what you need or what you’re doing wrong.
Instead, surprise surprise… It actually comes from taking the time to look backwards, to take stock of how far you’ve come. From reminding yourself of all the skills you do have and the things you are bringing to the table, and all the ways you’ve risen to meet the challenges you’ve faced in the past.
I’ve also learned that once you can stop outsourcing those instincts - whether to gurus, AI, your partner, friends, family, parents, bosses, teachers, business partners, or anyone else - everything starts to become a lot clearer. That the path starts to open up, the boredom lifts, and everything can even start to look kind of fun again.
I’ve also found it interesting how, after doing all these courses and working with all these people who made me feel like something was missing or broken in me, I’ve learned that that’s exactly what I don’t want to do in my 1:1 work. Instead, we focus on the whole story of you and use that to help us find a path that suits you, rather than emphasising all the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Which leads me to wonder about you - and how reading this has made you feel about your own path and where you’re going.
If you, too, may have been looking for trust in all the wrong places, and if so, how it might feel for you to hold that mirror up to yourself and think about everything you’ve already done. To take stock of all the skills and knowledge and things you’ve learned just to get to this point, and to focus on how far you’ve come, rather than how far you have to go.
Or maybe how it might feel for you to use your hands and make or fix something, too. Especially something tangible.
And if you want to join me in working together 1:1 or find out more about next month’s writing circle, you’re always welcome to check out my website or sign up for The Lemonade Factory. The doors are always open - although I do have to warn you, they might lead to slightly unexpected places… But, then again, I guess that’s kind of the point.
All my love,
Cx
Definitely identify with this idea of searching for answers in all the wrong places. I outsourced my decision making for so long and am still guilty of it in some respects!