The Fear of Choosing Wrong
El miedo a elegir mal
A question about navigating career change and the apparent tension between deepening in presence and taking bold action in one's professional life.
The Fear of Choosing Wrong
A question about navigating career change and the apparent tension between deepening in presence and taking bold action in one's professional life.
I was at a retreat in January, and I was laid off right after getting back. I was already beyond ready to let go of that job. Before I was laid off, I remember a morning where I woke up with this feeling of having greater agency over what I do with my time and energy, like I could make it up as I go along.
Since then, I've luckily had a lot of savings and unemployment insurance, and I've been working on a project but haven't found a full-time job yet. I haven't really been looking, in part because I've been wrestling with not wanting to get into another job that feels that way.
I have a few different options in front of me, and I feel compelled to choose something that feels aligned. This theme of people being laid off after retreat, and your system knowing, "This wasn't the right thing anyway," or "It was time, the universe gives you an out," I'm tempted to think of that as an auspicious thing and an opportunity.
But then when I try to think about how to capitalize on that opportunity, how to reinvent my life so it's more in harmony with my values, I find myself in this zone where it's like: I could go back to school and become a therapist, or try to become a coach, or go into teaching. But it's hard to make ends meet in many of those professions.
I felt compelled to bring this up because I'm about to resume looking for work in earnest. The deeper you go into this experience, the more effective you can be in your life. So what is the relationship between that depth and presence and awareness and one's livelihood, one's professional life? Is there a way to bridge those two, or is that just more of the striving and dissatisfaction cropping up in a different form?
This work is in no way in friction or opposition with growth, development, becoming, achieving, striving. Whenever you feel or experience that there's a polarity or a contradiction, know that it's not real. It's mind. There is a hallucinated contradiction.
The present reveals what you truly want
If you do this work, for example, what I was talking about in this meditation of more and more presence, you can answer more deeply and honestly what you want. Because you'll be able to see through what is avoidance.
Maybe what you truly want is to go back to tech and get a boring, dissatisfying job in order to do something else. Because that would be in service of a deeper desire that might require you to make ends meet, have a good income, not care too much about the work you do, and put energy elsewhere. Put yourself through school to study something else, for example. I'm not saying I'm having any intuition right now. I'm just describing a scenario that counters this false contradiction.
There is no paradox between this work of coming into the present and moving towards something you want, creating what you want. In fact, you will be more free to do something that could be boring, uncomfortable, or unsatisfying at one level. And if you feel like that's what you want, then the boring, dissatisfying, not very interesting job will be more joyful, because you're not looking for that satisfaction in the job.
That makes sense. I think it's also about being with the work consistently enough that you can see a vision through, or at least enough to take concrete steps. Sometimes I'm with it long enough or deep enough to have a vision or an inspiration, like that morning I woke up feeling this capacity to design my life more intentionally. It resonates with what you said about this work liberating energy.
It also requires risk: the ability to take risk, to feel fear, discomfort.
That's part of where having consistency really helps. If you're looking at taking a risk or doing something unknown, it's easy to have the vision and then be overcome with anxiety in the face of that risk and go, "Oh, never mind, I'm just going to go work for some company."
I guess what I'm saying is that the waffling I'm feeling is maybe a product of not having enough consistency to develop the clarity and to deal with the waves of fear or doubt, not getting knocked off course by them.
Lean into the risk
I have a sense you're avoiding and postponing. You're speaking about a hypothetical state that you can develop through meditation that will enable you to take risk without really taking risk. You imagine getting to a place where it's effortless, where you could just do it.
I would say: lean into the risk-taking. You will always feel unprepared. This work isn't going to remove the experience of fear or the feeling of being unprepared. In fact, I would say you will deepen more in presence by taking those risks. That might be a more powerful meditation than sitting still.
But always go for what you most deeply want, knowing that you might be wrong. And don't exclude the possibility that you want to just get a simple job that pays the bills in order to then pursue something else.
Something about what you said regarding the possibility of being wrong struck a chord. I have an aversion to being wrong because it's been painful in the past, and there's a part of me that wants to outwit that possibility.
If you have already accrued the wisdom to see that something is not the right path, then maybe don't take it. But if you don't know, it's better to try and find out than to imagine, "Oh, maybe it's the wrong choice, maybe it's going to hurt." You can do some preliminary inquiry and maybe find out that something is definitely not the right move. But avoiding the experimentation, avoiding putting yourself in a position to find out that this is not actually right, that you took a risk and lost: that is worthwhile in and of itself.
Fearward
A core aspect of this work is to meet whatever is happening now, which includes the fear of making a mistake and the pain of that. It's not about not moving. It's not about not acting. It is pro-movement, pro-action, pro-creativity, pro-risk-taking. It's fearward, towards fear. Because in fact, none of that happens anywhere other than in the present.
Always with discernment, though. "I'm afraid of crossing traffic with my eyes closed, that's fearward, let's do it," is not what I mean. That's why it's important to look really at what you want. If there's a very disproportionate, irrational sense of fear for what the actual risk is, it's a sign that it's the right direction. Walking across traffic warrants a sensible amount of fear for what it is. But there's a person you really like and you can't say hello: that's a disproportionate amount of fear for the risk. There's a professional direction you want to take and there's a disproportionate amount of fear for what it implies. There's a sense of something terrible, something deadly.
Often we don't even have the ability to consider the options we really want because we are so embedded in a belief system based on fear. This work will help untap that so you can consider options that before were not even conceivable, not even something you thought was possible in this life.
That's the creativity component.
It's creativity and freedom combined. What is free for you? If you already know what freedom is for you, that's not it. And that's where the risk comes in. Following my deepest sense right now, going in this direction, but I can't really know. I am unsure, but I am in movement.
Learning through movement
That is how we learn to refine our ability to move in deeper freedom, more aligned with what we really want: by that exploration, that practice. We grow in our ability to move towards what we want more deeply through this ongoing risk-taking. At first it might be that you take a risk, you fail, you get hurt. You try again and you keep trying, but always attuned to what you really want right now. And in a sense, there's an aligning that will happen, because the one thing you are listening to will deepen. It will be less personal, less egoic, and more of a universal, deeper want.
This is completely aligned with meditation or spiritual work, because that which is in the way is the attachment to what you believe you are. So that movement, that acting, comes more and more from a place that is, you could say, not acting: at peace with whatever is. Movement in stillness. But we usually get lost in constant movement, or in freezing, looking for that stillness before we move, waiting to be ready to move.