You Have To Be Able to Trust Yourself

When we had big industrial companies with layers of management and structure we could hide. We had bosses to tell us what we needed to do. Formal processes governed our movements. It was an environment of control, steadiness and consensus.

The hard part about the new economy we have been experiencing is the ambiguity. For the adventurous and creative it is a wonderful opportunity to try things and see if you can make an idea work.

However, if you are used to being told what to do and have your lines defined for where you can color within, then it is a scary, disorienting reality.

You may have had the luxury of diluting your responsibilities by trusting the group think. There’s solace with industrial setups and having managers, bosses and owners telling us what to do.

To really truly thrive today, you have to think like the executive. You have to make decisions and live with them. They are yours. Ultimately,  you have to be able to trust yourself.

Of course, this means you may be wrong. And the truth is, you will likely be wrong many times. That’s what I suspect scares most people. You’ve been trained in the illusion that you can’t be wrong. School taught you this. Industrial rigidity conditioned you to navigate your way towards this end instinctively.

But if you can trust yourself, then there’s a wide world of opportunity. You can start with an idea. Heck, you can have ideas.

Then you can test those ideas and make them happen with relatively little risk. The key is to pivot when you see the facts on the ground change. And that is when you have to trust yourself to make new decisions.

Maybe you haven’t given yourself permission to fail. Or you are always looking for others to validate your decisions.

If you want to thrive today, the best skill you can develop is to make decisions that you are committed to. Practice making decisions and trust yourself. You will be on your way to aligning to a flatter world with more opportunity this way. You can make your own way.