in.sight
a newsletter for the eyes of the mind
SERIES 01 | ISSUE 08
Following the rules is easy, following your heart is hard
When we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both.
– Brené Brown, American professor and author
I was once caught between choosing traditional employment and giving my unconventional ambitions a chance.
What made it difficult was that I’m totally comfortable complying to rules and systems in a typical office job. Following my heart and deviating from the norm scared me more. But sometimes you have to give that heart-based path a chance. And boy has that path been a rollercoaster for me. While it hasn’t been easy, it has been fairly rewarding.
If taking the leap scares you, asking yourself why will be the first step to overcoming them.
1) Lifetime conditioning
Once you choose to follow your heart, you begin the journey of going against everything you know. This includes the deeply ingrained “school-work-family-retire” framework (ps. there’s nothing wrong to choose so). Doubt escalates because we’re simply not trained to go against the tide.
2) Stiff beliefs
Our upbringing, culture, and environment shapes and hardens our beliefs. We believe we need to look a certain way, achieve a certain milestone by a certain age. As a result, much of our self-worth is formed according to these standards. Yet when you choose the unconventional, timeline and standards might not align with these long-lasting beliefs. Hence, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind.
3) Painful falls
Following my heart has been a slog through the swamps rather than a walk in the park. No matter how firm your end-goal is, no matter how strategic you are with your roadmap, you can still get lost along the way. You can still stumble painfully over hard rocks. Know that it’s okay to fall, you’ll get better at getting up each time.
💝 noteworthy
Book: Rising Strong (Brené Brown)
This heart-based path I’m striving for has a lot to do with the physics of vulnerability: If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. In Rising Strong, Brené tells us what it takes to get back up, and how owning our stories of disappointment, failure, and heartbreak gives us the power to write a daring new ending.
😌 calm corner
TED Talk: The power of vulnerability (Brené Brown)
I’ve raved about this TED Talk so much before but I’m not stopping. With 19 million views to date, Brené draws on her studies on human connection to explain how empathy and vulnerability are the keys to healing humanity – from individual to systemic levels.