“Weird.” This has been my default answer to the question, “Hey Dylan, how are you doing?” At the beginning of 2017 I took a serious leap of faith. Having spent five years working at various mental health agencies in Boulder, Colorado I decided it was finally time to strike out on my own. I found an office, put together marketing materials, registered myself as a business entity, and by the end of January I was ready to enter the world of self-employment. I was nervous, beyond excited, and had no concept of just how challenging this was going to be.
Therapy is an interesting field. Unlike most other professions I can’t sell you on my services personally. In order to avoid the bizarre quagmire that is dual-relationship, to work with you as a client it’s actually best if we’ve never met before. This makes marketing an interesting challenge. I’ve worked over the last seven months meeting other therapists, making myself known to schools and other organizations, all in hopes of them taking my marketing torch and referring for me. It’s a bizarre leap of faith, with no immediate rewards. After all this time, I’m only just now starting to get some referrals back from those folks I contacted so many months ago. It is a waiting game I feel like I am only just starting to wrap my head around, and in the mean time I have had oodles of time to second guess myself.
What does all this mean for you? Well over the course of this process I’ve come across a few small gems that I think worth applying to any endeavor that calls on you to follow your dream. For those willing to take the leap, the greatest and hardest part about any passion project is that it is all on you. There is no one dictating your structure or how to best implement your designs. This gives you incredible freedom. A freedom that can be totally overwhelming. Where do I start? What will make this grow from an idea into a reality? How do I know anything I do is working? All of these questions and many more will show up, and if you’re not careful they can easily bog you down.
Here is what I have found that has been helpful so far….
- Do something Every Day. – I recently attended a Die Antwoord concert (a foul mouthed South African rap duo) and one of the artists addressed the crowd with this bit of advice. She shared how she had grown up incredibly poor and was now an international rapping success. She kept it short and sweet and told the crowd one thing. Do what you love every day.
Even if you don’t know what you are doing, by putting energy into what you love you are building a habit of working on it. By messing around with the various aspects of your work (whether it be writing, creating content, organizing yourself) you’ll naturally discover things that really work and things that really don’t. Which brings me to my next point….
- Embrace Failure. – When taking a big risk to start something new you literally don’t know what you are doing! This means you are going to get it wrong constantly. Every step of moving your vision from the realm of dream to concrete reality is going to reveal short-comings, weaknesses, strengths, and inspiration. These things are valuable, though the experience may be excruciating.
Rather than viewing struggle as failure or some proof of your own badness, I encourage you to look at it simply as feedback. As you birth your vision into the world you will face challenges you didn’t even know existed. Rather than being wrong that sense of failure is the world and your own intuition showing you what can be different. Where things could be better, what you need more practice in, and what aspects of your work might need to change. This feedback is tremendously helpful in that it reveals where you might….
- Ask for Help. – This one is a particularly hard one for me. I love to think of myself as the all sustaining, don’t need nothing from nobody type, and asking for help legitimately freaks me out. But I still need it. About three months into this adventure I was feeling super stuck, didn’t know what I could be doing effectively with my time, and was receiving a lot of feedback (see: failing) that I needed to do something different. So I signed up for a session with an online marketing coach, and it changed everything.
To me that is the best part about asking for help. It’s vulnerable to reach out and admit you don’t know what you are doing, or that you are feeling stuck. I get it, it’s certainly the last thing I want others to think of me. But by accepting my need for help, I was able to get exactly what I needed. I found a lot more momentum in working on my practice, and reconnected with the sense of inspiration that led me to start this in the first place. Which leads me to my final piece…
- Be Kind to your Process. –It’s going to be bewildering and overwhelming and at times an incredible joy. It will absolutely take turns you never would have expected, and there will be doubts that encourage you to throw it all away. None of this is out of place.
You’ve embarked on perhaps the most human experience. Taking your inner vision and changing the world; at least a small pocket of it. The more you can make space in your life and in your experience for whatever shows up, the more energy you will have to keep going forward, and the more success you will have to show for it.
