Challenging Your Own Ideas

“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
~ Steven King

Every once in a while, you hear an idea, and think, “Brilliant!” That’s how I felt when I read this Daily OM post last week about how to deal with the negativity that holds us back from accomplishing our dreams. These are the paragraphs that really resonated:

“If there’s something ambitious you wish to do, come up with a list of all the reasons why you can’t do it. Then set about to prove yourself wrong.

Acknowledge the problems, delineate the challenges, right off the bat. Give yourself a detailed and realistic picture of what you’re up against.

By specifying the challenges, you give yourself control over them. Suddenly you have a workable pathway to success.”

The reason the suggestion is so great is that despite how enthusiastic we might be at the start of a new endeavor, at some point those naysaying ideas enter in our heads and cause us to lose momentum without us even realizing it.

Using this technique, we can actively work to identify the problems ahead of time, allowing us to become our own challengers.

Many years ago I came up with this two-part philosophy, which has held me in good stead:

1. Any idea worth pursuing is worth defining.

If you can’t define what it is you’re attempting to do well enough to explain it to others, you haven’t gotten far enough along in your thinking to start implementing it. I saw an extreme example of this last week on Help! I Wrecked My House on HGTV. On the weekly show, host Jasmin Roth “comes to the rescue of overzealous do-it-yourselfers and works to redeem failed home improvement projects.”

This episode featured a couple who were struggling because the husband couldn’t stop himself from trying to DIY projects his wife envisioned. His desire to please her was admirable, but, unfortunately, he had no renovation skills. As soon as he opened up some of their walls, he got overwhelmed, and stopped. But somehow that didn’t deter him the next time she had an idea about how to improve the house. Square off the rounded archways? Chop through the kitchen peninsula to create an island instead? He’d done some kind of demo in nearly every room, to the point where the kids were embarrassed to bring their friends home, which was really distressing his wife. And, as Jasmine pointed out, some of his actions actually made the house less safe.

As she and her team took over the renovation and taught the husband what was really involved, a lightbulb finally went on. He realized that without a vision and a plan for what he wanted to make happen, he didn’t have a chance at being successful. As she left the house after a $60,000 reno, Jasmine extracted a promise from him that he would never take a hammer to their walls again.

2. Any idea worth pursuing is worth defending.

If your concept is a good one, and you’ve thought it through, you should be able to defend it when others start questioning it. I’ve always had a lot of ideas, and I love the validation that comes from sharing them with others and having them get excited with me. (I’ve read that we get a Dopamine high—similar to a runner’s high—at times like these which gives us a temporary lift.)

When I was younger, and proudly announced my ideas, my family would more often than not begin poking holes at them. As the baby, and a sensitive soul at that, I often took offense. (And I was deflated as well. Dopamine surges don’t last very long, apparently.) My dad was incredibly bright, and he stressed logic and critical thinking a lot, so my siblings and I all have good skills for evaluating what’s likely to work and what the pitfalls might be. But when you’re jazzed about something you can see so clearly in your head, it’s hard to have your bubble burst so quickly.

It took me a while to understand the importance of being able to defend an idea. I learned that if you believe in something, and have done your homework, you should be able to answer even the toughest questions about it. Once I realized that, it totally changed my point of view. I began to be much more comfortable with the challengers in my life, and grateful for the insight they offered.

As the Daily OM post suggests, once you see what the likely problems will be, they simply become obstacles to overcome.

I’m a top down thinker and it’s easy for me to divide projects into steps. In other words, I’m okay with the vision part. What never occurred to me in such a clear way before reading that post is to be so explicit about evaluating our own ideas up front, looking for potential pitfalls, and using that list as a tool to prove to ourselves that we can overcome the obstacles. That’s the brilliant piece—the one that ensures we can make it to the finish point.

Rather than starting a new enterprise and getting overwhelmed, if we use the Daily OM method to start with, we will have already taken the steps to figure out how to solve the complications before we even encounter them. This will ensure that our confidence won’t wane halfway through.

You’ve probably heard the motivational question, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” If you have an idea, maybe it’s time to get to work creating that “detailed and realistic picture of what you’re up against,” and then decide to be brave and go for it!

Affectionately,

Elaine