Every decision you make is just an experiment.

All of them. 

Ain’t nobody out here in these streets handing out promises that if you wait until you think you’re perfectly ready to shoot your shot, you’ll get an A+ for preparedness and everything will work out exactly according to your plans.

That’s not how life works. 

In fact, it actually works the other way around. 

Haven’t you heard the saying “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”?

Haven’t you heard the saying: “Woman plans, God laughs”?

I’m sure you have. And I also know that these are the kinds of sayings you can know must be true in your mind, intellectually, and still feel like you’ll vomit or die if you even think about trying to live by them.

So I’m here today to offer you some tricks to living this ‘shackles off’, radically liberated, ‘let the chips fall where they may because it’s all an experiment anyway’ kind of life.

The first trick is to just take the natural next step. 

If you have an idea that feels really big to you, don’t try to plan everything all the way out. That’s the fastest way to overthinking, overhwhelm-ment, to creating false prerequisites and flipping your struggle switch on. 

It’s also the fastest way to suck all the inspiration out of your big, beautiful, uniquely YOU idea. 

It’s the fastest way to talk yourself out of taking even the first step. 

You win if you take one step. Even if that step is as small as researching something, making a call, changing your bio on LinkedIn.

The next trick is to notice how you feel when you daydream about the various options before you. If you have an idea that just feels like liberation in your spirit? If one option feels expansive in your chest, even if it seems ridiculous, logically speaking? If one of your choices feels like awe and wonder and exhilaration and expansion and enthusiasm? 

Pick that one. Because the things you do that feel like that are always a link in the golden chain of your highest good. This is true whether they work out the way your thinking mind would deem “successful” or not.

Because the Divine Mind — the infinite intelligence that runs the show in this Universe — is speaking to you and through you all the time. 

And the Divine Mind speaks within you, to you in the form of your soul’s callings and intuitions and nudges and hunches of Inner Guidance, and those shackles OFF feelings and those brilliant golden threads of inspired ideas. 

And the Divine Mind knows more than your intellectual thinking mind will ever know. 

Catch this principle: Your Inner Guidance knows 100% of the things your human, intellectual mind knows, plus plus plus plus plus.

Oh and catch this principle, too: the Divine Order is neither logical nor linear. 

I have worked mightily in my life, I did all the things. I got the grad degree, I went to law school I had a great plan. I worked the plan.

And it did work.

But the best things that happened in my career, the best things that have happened in my life, I didn’t plan any of that.

It was not a logical or linear process to get to those many many hundreds of thousands of peak realities and experiences that I’ve been blessed with.

Because the Divine Order is neither logical nor linear. 

So don’t limit it to what is logical and linear or understandable to your intellectual human thinking mind.

Because your thinking mind might lay out an action plan that goes from A to B to C and step-by-step on to Z.

You put a time frame on it. And you will start telling yourself that you are behind if you don’t accomplish, achieve, hustle and make it happen by that timeline.

But the Divine Mind will take you from A to B to F, back to B a couple times, and then fast forward you on to Z and beyond. 

To where you can’t even imagine where the Divine Mind will take you. 

Not only can you not even imagine the destination of the Divine Mind, the Divine Mind will light up all these brilliant steps before you and line up all these opportunities and co-creators for you, step by step. Sometimes it will accelerate you. Sometimes it will delay you. 

But all of the time it will benefit you.

And you stand to miss that benefit and those opportunities and those co-creators if you’re too fixated on what you think the action plan should be or what the timeline should look like.

Woman plans, God laughs. You dig? 

Seriously, your Inner Critic is the voice that says you’re falling behind, that says you should be an overnight success already, that says you’re getting too old to ever really make it. 

Your Inner Critic is the voice that says “hurry up!” “what’s taking so long”, “you need to set tighter timelines” “be more productive”. 

And in that way, your Inner Critic is the enemy of Divine Order and Divine Timing.

Because if you listen to the time scarcity lies of your Inner Critic, you’ll rush through your action plan and you’ll miss all the brilliant serendipities and wonderful perfect place-perfect time alignments that will surprise and delight you when you tap out of the race against the clock. 

Oh and the other trick to living this shackles off, liberated, inspired, self-actualized life… the trick to making decisions about what to do next and the trick to break your inner stalemates about those decisions… the trick is to zoom out, zoom out more… zoom waaaay out.

Because if you zoom out from yourself in this moment, just for a minute – most of the time I’m going to ask you to live in day-tight compartments, but in this particular issue, when you’re facing a decision and if feels like a stalemate – you’ll see that nothing in life is guaranteed, not even the results of playing small and what seems like “safe”. 

If you zoom out from your current goals, you can look back and see how many of the glorious realities of your current day life came to you by grace and in surprising ways you could never have planned or even imagined. 

And if you zoom out from this moment to the stretch of your whole life, you’ll see that very, very few decisions you’ve ever struggled with in the past now warrant more than a mention in a paragraph in the book of your life, not even the ones you agonized over at the time.

And if you zoom from this moment out to the 300,000 years of human evolution, you’ll see that there’s no decision you can make in your life today that will read as “total catastrophe” through that lens.

And maybe that allows you to give yourself a little bit of a break.

Every decision you make is just an experiment. 

But if you have a strong Inner Critic, it may be telling you that you are courting disaster if you do any of the things you dream of doing that feel like exposure or vulnerability.

Because your Inner Critic is generally a protective mental pattern. It’s trying to protect you from whatever you’re afraid of, often whatever your family of origin deemed the Very Worst Thing to be or experience. 

It’s trying to protect you from looking stupid.

It’s trying to protect you from making mistakes. 

It’s trying to protect you from being fat, poor, ugly, ignored, insignificant. 

It’s not doing a great job of protecting you, to be clear. It’s a bit of a bumbler, is the truth. But it’s trying. 

And in its trying, your Inner Critic is definitely protecting you from being, doing, having and creating the things you’ve always wanted.

It’s also protecting you from learning what you need to learn to become who your Inner Wise Being is trying to become. 

And it’s definitely protecting you from freedom, growth and joy.

I don’t even think you want to be protected from those things.

How it works is your Inner Critic will either immobilize you entirely or cause you to live in an eternal state of hypervigilant delay, perfectionism, busywork, planning and procrastinating, and always working on something but never quite ready to do your own personal dreams and soul-deep callings. 

Because if you pull the trigger… if you go all-in? 

You could fail. 

…And then what? 

But here’s what your Inner Critic is missing…the fundamental truth that all your decisions are experiments. 

Including and especially the decision not to make a decision. 

Perpetual delay is a decision. Inaction is a decision. And when you make that decision habitually, you wire your spirit and your neurobiology into a template where incompletion, unfulfillment, dissatisfaction and disappointment all feel like normal.

Hiding your light is a decision.

Holding yourself back is a decision and, as such, it’s an experiment. 

Haven’t you run that experiment enough to see how it plays out?  

Taking a natural next step that feels scary or untethering but also exhilarating? That’s a decision and an experiment, too. 

What I find in coaching very smart, very successful people is that most people who habitually make the decision to stop hiding their light and start taking the natural, next step toward fulfilling their deepest desires — they almost all have the same experimental “result” regardless of whether the step they take technically succeeds or fails.

The “natural next step” experiment produces a wave of worthiness, self-respect, and the feeling of inner peace because you’re no longer fighting yourself, shoving parts of yourself down, resisting your own ideas and battling your Inner Genius.

Taking the natural next step and letting the chips fall is an experiment that produces a few other results, too. 

It opens the door to a little magic. 

It issues an invitation to good luck and good fortune. 

It breaks the curse of habitual indecision and delay.

It rewrites and rewires the template of disappointment, unfulfillment, and dissatisfaction.

It opens the door to the assisting forces of this Universe that are on pause until you reactivate and reanimate them by taking that step forward and running that experiment. 

It somehow broadcasts a signal of “I’m ready!” to other people and events that all unknowingly show up to co-create with you, in the zone of genius you stepped into when you got that bright idea in the first place and decided to move forward.

So, if this first month of 2021 finds you facing any decisions that feel difficult at all, my advice to you is this: 

Zoom out.

Get quiet. 

Feel for “shackles off”.

Choose that.

Take what feels like the inspired, natural next step. Don’t try to figure out a 5-year-action plan, unless that happens to be the inspired, natural next step.

Then take the natural next step after that.

Run the experiment. 

Let the chips fall.

Feel the wave of worthiness.

Watch what lights up.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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