In today’s blog, we are going to be looking at Guideposts #5 and #6 from Brené Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection. Especially in today’s world, I think that Letting Go of the Need for Certainty and Letting Go of Comparison are two very important mindset shifts to strive toward.
Guidepost #5 Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith
Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
As a social worker, one of the first things we learned in our clinical work was to listen to and to trust our gut. Did you know our gut is really our body’s way of acknowledging intuition? I can attest that in my 25 years of social work, my intuition has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
I remember some pretty scary times doing home visits in either home health or hospice programs where I found myself in a sketchy neighborhood and or house with volatile people or situations, and everything in me said “get the heck out of here now.”
Our Gut is usually the first place we feel emotion, yet we so often try to ignore it by focusing on all the external noise of life. In the case of my home health experiences, I was trying to ignore my gut in order to not appear afraid when my Fight and Flight alarm was saying “leave now.”
Faith in something bigger than ourselves and or universal energy, is a powerful tool for connecting to intuition. It doesn’t have to be an organized religion. Those who can accept that there is some mystery and remove barriers to Certainty, often are able to live with less fear.
There isn’t an inventory scale measure for this guidepost as it was taken out due to the subjectivity of defining Faith, but if there was one, I think I would score high on intuition and Faith as I learned to let go of certainty a long time ago.
Guidepost #6 Cultivating Creativity
Letting Go of Comparison
It’s funny how often clients or group participants will tell me that they are “not creative.” In fact my own awareness of my creativity got lost for many years while I was raising kids and fearful that I didn’t have the same abilities as others.
Creativity and Music
I remember auditioning as a keyboardist and vocalist for a contemporary church band and I was so afraid of comparison at first. Then when I leaned into my creativity and just did me, I learned that I actually embraced so much fun during this time and it reminded me of all the creativity I used to have writing music. Some of my most effective coping and grief processing came through the composing of music and storytelling.
Creativity In Design
Then when I wanted to build my practice and the fears set in I just kept getting visions to pick the colors and start decorating the office before I even had a space. Then one day I had the space and my creative juices started to flow.
Fight The Gremlins of Comparison
Despite my awareness of my own creativity and abilities, I still have to fight the large gremlin of comparison that can stop me from taking risks at times. I still need to practice my daily mindset and lean into that intuition and faith in order to think big, be courageous, and do it anyway. I have to work to ignore the naysayers and people who are too afraid to live big in their own lives, and want to try to stifle my creative passions.
If you are interested in my upcoming October one-day workshop on The Gifts of Imperfection please click here for more information and to register.
