TASTY THOUGHTS: Avoiding things
A human reflection of what things are really holding me back...
Running your own business is not a straight line toward mastery. It is a continuous negotiation with your own identity. You clear one level and there is always another place to row to. I know this because I hear it in every founder conversation I have, whether it is the companies I am branding or the creatives I am collaborating with. Underneath the strategy talk, there is always a thing being avoided.
For most people it is visibility. It is the fear of putting a version of yourself into the world before you are fully sure that version exists yet, which, if you think about it for longer than is healthy, describes basically everyone who has ever posted anything. This is why there is so much content about the parts of business that are safe to discuss. The sales funnel. The marketing plan. The lead generator. These are the vegetables of entrepreneurship, virtuous, photographable, and completely beside the point. Nobody wants to talk about the kernel, the first flicker of belief that a thing should exist and that you, of all people, are the one to build it. That part is too personal. It is the joy of creating something from your own soul and then, for reasons that still baffle me, handing it to strangers on the internet to have an opinion about.
Finding the kernel is half the battle and then of course the building, selling, sharing comes into play. I always say branding or building a brand is not for the faint hearted, it takes courage to do the thing before you feel ready. Experimenting in public. Because you will never feel ready, readiness being a myth invented by people who were not paying attention. Scaffolding yourself with the people around you so you keep moving instead of circling the same idea forever like a Roomba that has found a sock.
The psychology of avoidance is not complicated once you stop being polite about it. The brain does not distinguish between an unfinished business and an unfinished self. It files them in the same place. So when the thing we are avoiding is actually an early, unproven version of our own identity, avoiding it feels like self preservation rather than procrastination. It is not laziness. It is a nervous system correctly identifying a threat and incorrectly deciding that not moving is the safest response to it.
Breaking the loop is not about courage in the abstract. It is a sequence, and skipping a step is usually why people stay stuck longer than they need to.
The loop out of avoidance
