Everybody’s Got An Opinion

In my last post, Community Sweet Community, I talked about the ecourse I had stumbled upon and how she didn’t offer any kind of community with her ecourse and how I felt about that.  The other thing that stood out to me about her ecourse was her adamant plea with participants to NOT get the opinions of peers on the writing they were doing.

Can I get a hell yes?

I’ve been dying to talk about this for a while.  Not in terms of writing per say.  In terms of everything you do.

There was a day when I needed 20 different opinions about everything I did.  Everything!  Here’s what happened…

• I had to wait for responses.
• I had to decipher what they meant by their responses.
• I felt like I was bugging people.
• Almost every opinion was different.
• Because they were so different, I didn’t know who was “right.”
• It was harder, in the end, to make a decision.
• I wasn’t learning to trust my own feelings about the decision that was right for me AND I was never going to learn if I stayed on that path.

And that last one was the biggest one…the most important one.

I knew I was never going to get anywhere doing things the way I was doing them.  I couldn’t keep asking everyone else about everything I was doing.  I had to “grow up” and gain the self-confidence to believe in the decisions I made for myself…by myself.

If you get nothing else from this post, please understand this…

You cannot gain the success you desire without the confidence to make decisions on your own.

You just can’t.

In terms of what I do in my business…it’s really challenging to have to wait for a client to get back to me as they have their friends and family and coach and whoever else review the work I’ve done for them.  I see the confusion it creates in the client…having a harder time making decisions about what works because of that input and it creates a job that takes considerably longer than intended.  I’ve occasionally had clients even run my work past designer friends of theirs for feedback and I find myself wondering why they didn’t choose to work with that person in the first place.

Another take-away…

Always work with someone you trust.

When you are able to work at the speed of trust with someone and confident about making your own decisions, you can get things done so much for efficiently and effectively.  Personally, I can feel it and it allows me to tap into the energy of the project on a much deeper level and find the client and I will be able to work so well together and everything just flows.  Isn’t that the sweet spot in a project for you?  It is for me!

I loved the fact that this ecourse instructor I stumbled upon understood the harm that these peer reviews can do to someone.  There are so many reasons for this…

• They are most likely not your target market.
• They may not understand fully what you do or what your goals are and they don’t know the right questions to ask.
• They may be a very skilled coach or skilled decorator or skilled friend but they are not probably skilled in the area you need support.
• You have no idea if they are even being honest with you about what they think.

There are so many benefits to developing that inner knowing…that self-confidence that allows you to make your own decisions, including who to work with on projects and the bonus is knowing it will never steer you wrong.   You will gain more and more confidence as you step out of your comfort zone and stand on your own two feet.  Even if you feel later like something could have been tweaked or done differently, you’ve learned and grown from that decision and you’ll make even better ones in the future.

There are no mistakes when you learn something.

Allow yourself to shine.  Give yourself credit for knowing what’s best for you.  Do it today.