The Importance Of Changing Your Mind
You may have seen me sharing my to do lists on Instagram Stories, and if you’ve seen that you’ll have seen how often I change my mind. It can be little things, like writing this post on Monday not Friday, or doing a podcast episode about y instead of x. Or sometimes it’s big things like taking all the focus and content plans for autumn, and doing the opposite.
I had September all planned. I’d talked it all through with friends and it made sense. It was a sensible, professional plan – I would make some tweaks and re-launch Mapping, which would follow on really well content-wise from the end of The Cabin launch and also, crucially, meant I didn’t need to make something new. So I planned out September with that in mind and went through the motions even though the plan sat uncomfortably around me. Even though there was something else on my mind.
I kept following the sensible plan up until the point I was editing the sales page for Mapping and I just thought “no, this isn’t the right thing for right now”. I couldn’t ignore the sneaking suspicion anymore: the sensible plan was only sensible on paper. In real terms, it was the much harder option.
There were a couple of reasons for this. In The Cabin launch, which had been about six weeks all in, I had drunk the well dry of my content ideas around fulfilment. I needed some time for the water to seep back in at the bottom, to live a little more life to re-inspire my thoughts on big picture thinking. While I had content ideas for this Mapping re-launch, I didn’t feel psyched to create them – just looking at the plan made me feel tired. Not exactly prime launch energy.
Also, although on paper it makes sense for two similarly themed launches to follow each other (because a lot of groundwork has been done in the first), it also doesn’t because you risk fatiguing your audience, and for those who didn’t buy in the first launch, you’re kinda saying “hey here’s more stuff you didn’t want”. This, combined with the societal temperature right now, made me feel very clear that something practical and functional was more what was needed right now.
Which was lucky, because for two months I have had an idea for something practical and functional. An idea I’ve been nursing and spoon feeding and keeping in the airing cupboard where it’s warm and dim so it can grow stronger. I think in a lot of ways my daily list sharing was an expression of this, a natural outlet I found to talk and share about the things that were interesting me. I was going to save this idea for later, for January maybe, but I didn’t want to wait. I wanted people to have this. So I had to change the plan.
So I did. Just as September was starting I closed one Google doc and opened another. I copied the September content calendar and then deleted all the entries. I got the blank pieces of paper and thought “ok, now what?”. And out it came.
The moral of this story is about energy. It’s about holding the reins lightly enough that you can change direction without wrenching. It’s about not letting the plan be the boss of you, and not doing something that doesn’t feel right just because it’s what you planned. It’s also not about changing every five minutes because you’re convinced the next idea is The One. It’s about listening to your excitement, your energy, your attention, looking in the direction they are pointing, and then calmly continuing with Plan A, keeping an eye on whether they get bored and lie down or whether they keep their noses trained on Plan B. It’s about giving yourself enough time to know it’s not just discomfort but a genuine desire, and trusting yourself to follow through on that. It’s about understanding your energy and working with it to create projects that are truly what you want to be doing.
