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I was talking to someone a day or so ago over email about a decision they had to make about the book they had written and they said, “I know you’re going to tell me to follow my intuition on this…”
And that was true. The advice I ended up giving them had a good dose of “follow your intuition” in it.
But I also find that “follow you intuition” doesn’t cut it for a lot of people.
Mainly because we assume that if we get good at following our intuition, we’re going to get this lightning bolt of “just knowing” that seems to come from out of the blue.
We think it’s going to feel like this rock-solid feeling of settling on the perfect thing.
So, when that kind of feeling doesn’t show up, when it’s not like that, we don’t really know what to do next.
With this person I was talking to, I wanted to make it clear that I didn’t mean this kind of experience when I said, “follow your intuition.”
Instead, what I really meant was:
Trust your own judgment.
This is one of the hardest things for INFJs and INFPs to do sometimes, and it comes back to an issue with perfectionism.
When you struggle with perfectionism, you assume that there is a perfect option, and if you’re not finding it or seeing it, then you just need to try harder.
You assume that you can land on this “perfect option” if you generate a long enough list of pros vs. cons, or if you get feedback from enough people.
What you don’t see is that you can always come up with another pro, and another con to counter it. And that you can endlessly seek feedback from other people, and each one of them will give you a different—and entirely subjective—opinion.
And none of this gets you anywhere.
Because the issue is not figuring out “how to decide” or “how to know” or “how to not fail.”
The issue is that we don’t know how to trust our own judgment.
When we are unable to trust our own judgment, we are dealing with an unhealed wound, deep inside, and that wound undermines anything we try to build.
Because you can’t build a solid structure on an unhealed wound.
The wound is linked to a limiting belief that says: “The only way to achieve anything is to control everything,” and “the only way to be successful is to never fail.”
This can be crazy-making, and it also leads to serious creative blocks.
This is the topic I’m tackling in my new workshop, happening this Sunday, January 18, called The Prison of Perfectionism (and How to Break Free).
This workshop is for people who:
Have a terror of making mistakes in life.
Seek too much feedback from others before making decisions.
Don’t know how to trust our own judgment.
Say yes to too many things.
Tend to become trapped in cycles of constant burnout and recovery.
Have extreme difficulty launching creative work into the world.
You can find all the details and register here:
THE PRISON OF PERFECTIONISM (AND HOW TO BREAK FREE) WORKSHOP
This workshop will be recorded, and all registrants will receive a link to the recording 24 to 48 hours after the event.
Any other questions, reply to this email.
Lauren
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