I recently enrolled in an 8-week class on building a successful freelance business, and already on week 2 I’m being encouraged to focus on finding actual clients. This was a scary proposition for me. Theorizing about what I might like to do and how it could succeed was fun and exciting for me, but to actually start reaching out to prospective clients — risking ridicule and rejection — seemed like too much, too quickly, and I spent the next couple days doing nothing related to the course.

The reason I decided to distance myself from the course was because of the eerie uncertainty I now felt around it. I looked at what I was being asked to do and thought, “I don’t know if I can do this.” But upon examining my fears of failure and rejection more deeply, and thinking back to how I’ve overcome similar fears in different areas of my life in the past, I came to an interesting conclusion.

The area of my life that’s going best right now is my relationship with my girlfriend — something I’d wanted for even longer than having a business of my own, but that I’d failed to achieve through the first 26 years of my life — and the events that finally resulted in the changes that led to me having this awesome relationship started in a very strange way: with admitting to myself that I was being a coward.

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How much of your discontent lies with a desire to do more? And how much of it lies with your desire to see more worth in what you already do?

What if you saw more in what you’re already doing, and as a consequence were able to get better results from doing less work than you think is required to get you to where you want to go?

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I’m really starting to notice how important “the middle” is. The part of our lives that is neither remarkably positive nor uncomfortably negative.

It’s really easy to notice the extremes, but a big chunk of my life, a big chunk of everyone’s life, settles in the middle. Not because we’re failing to stir things up, but because we all have an experience of what we consider normal, and that set-point is what enables us to detect change and figure out where we’re going.

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Receiving praise is a lot like receiving money. I’m not really comfortable with receiving either when I know I could be doing so much more.

If I was doing my absolute best, I’d have no trouble receiving all the money and adoration that comes with remarkable success. But when I see myself playing small, any notion that I’m doing something big feels like a lie. “It’s not worth praising me for that, I could be doing so much more!” “It’s not worth paying me for that, I’m not nearly as good as I can be!”

This perspective helps continually drive me to become more, but it also cuts me off from the very resources and positive self-image that would make it much easier to do so.
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