After a decade of doubting myself, and a year into coaching others professionally, I’ve come to realise that ‘I don’t know what I want / what to do’ can often be code for ‘I don’t dare to imagine.’
Your ability to see beyond your current reality requires creative thinking, to see new perspectives and possibilities – to imagine another way.
My decision to become a coach was a process of seven years, mainly because I had stunted my own imagination through doubt, perfectionism and fear of judgement.
The seed of an idea was planted in 2017.
The seedling had no room to grow in my mental capacity and didn’t see the light of day until 2023 when somewhere in the corners of my mind it found a ray of light and a shoot finally grew to the surface.
For the next three years I slowly nourished it with space, time, reading, reflection, the rich attention of others, and – most crucially – an expansive and creative mindset.
By the time my life context was such that I could take a punt at this, the idea was ripe and ready enough for me to lose all sense of doubt and procrastination. I was enrolled on a training course, found long-term volunteer coaching clients and had a company set up, all within weeks.
The biggest shift for me was not confidence or self-belief, it was allowing myself to sit long enough in the space of not knowing, of play, of imagination.
To hold a new idea with enough time and focus so that I could dare to imagine how I, and my life, might look different on this path.
So what might be holding you back from accessing this creative mindset?
1) DYSREGULATION
You’ve been stuck in your current context for too long, made the best of it for too long and perhaps even tipped yourself into chronic survival mode. When your nervous system is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, you prioritise getting through the day and have little capacity for dreaming up new possibilities for your work life. Creativity simply isn’t accessible in that state; it requires a regulated nervous system. Without returning to a regulated state, you’re also more likely to fall into black-and-white thinking. You might swing the pendulum to the opposite extreme, rejecting everything about your current life and running as far as possible from all that feels familiar. But a complete overhaul isn’t always the path to fulfilment. The pendulum might also swing more regularly between “I must quit tomorrow” and “I’ll just stay where I am forever”, with no option visible in between.
2) FEAR OF FAILURE
Fear of failure makes you hypervigilant to every possible negative outcome. The brain already has a negativity bias, where it naturally gives more weight, attention, and memory to negative information, emotions and experiences; a fear state turns the volume on that right up. Before you’ve even let yourself explore an option, you’ve found the flaw, the risk, the reason it won’t work. Every path looks like a dead end before you’ve taken a single step down it. Beyond the work to reframe such a fear response, it’s in our interest to try and access as many positive emotions as possible, especially during a time of hardship where we see no way out. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research shows that fear narrows our focus, while positive emotions like joy, pride and love literally broaden the range of possibilities we can see and make us more creative, open-minded, and receptive to new ideas (Broaden-and-Build Theory).
3) FEAR OF SUCCESS
Sometimes it’s not failure you’re afraid of, but the possibility that things might actually work out. Getting what you imagined turns the daydream into real life, with all the change that brings. What if it doesn’t feel the way you hoped? What if you lose the comforting “one day” that’s been carrying you through? What if it changes you, or how others see you? So without realising it, you keep your ideas vague and out of reach. Staying stuck can feel uncomfortable, but at least it’s a familiar discomfort.
4) JUDGEMENT
The risk of your choice being judged by others means you never fully give yourself permission to sit in the ‘not knowing’, that uncomfortable liminal space between where you are now and where you might go. Instead of lingering there with curiosity, you rush to address your doubt with a sensible answer or shut it down altogether. Not having it all figured out already feels like failing, and writing the story that others expect of you can often feel like the safest route to being right.
5) PERFECTIONISM
Perfectionism edits your new ideas before they can ever surface. Any thought that isn’t fully formed or logical within your current trajectory gets dismissed before it gets a chance to fully develop. But that early, messy thinking stage is where new possibilities begin. When you don’t give yourself permission to entertain incomplete ideas, you don’t give yourself the opportunity to explore, test, and let something evolve. A creative, innovative mindset depends on play, and you can’t play if everything has to be right first time.
6) HIGH-STAKES THINKING
Fear of commitment, or a self-imposed duty to stick with whatever you decide, makes every decision feel enormously high-stakes. If choosing any new direction means being locked into it for the long haul, your newest, most creative (and possibly most valuable) ideas often go into hiding. But imagining a different future isn’t the same as signing up to it. You’re allowed to try an idea on for size: you can wear it for a while, notice how it feels, and take it off again if it doesn’t suit.
7) CYNICISM
Protective cynicism gets in the way of dreaming. “That’s just how the real world works.” “I don’t need to like my job that much.” Most of us pick up these beliefs from past disappointments, from the people around us, from years of being told to be realistic. They can feel like maturity, wisdom even, and they often protect us from being let down. But they also get loud enough to drown out the authentic voice underneath: what you truly want, what you hope and fear, what might be possible for you. They cap your hopes before you’ve begun, and stop you from seeing a full, rich picture of what a fulfilling life could look like.
So when we’re feeling stuck and struggle to access a creative mindset, what are we usually told to do? “Just take action.”
In the coaching and personal development world on social media, there’s a belief so widely held it has become almost dogmatic: action comes first, and thinking only slows you down.
The idea is often credited to the American writer and lecturer Dale Carnegie, with the much-quoted line: “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage”. Take the first step, however small, and you break the paralysis and build the self-assurance you need to keep moving. Tony Robbins turned it into a rallying cry, urging us towards “massive action” to create immediate momentum. And The Lean Startup, the business book on everyone’s shelf, made the MVP (minimum viable product) a mantra: build it, launch it, learn as you go.
And while it’s hard to deny that action builds momentum, there’s been a mainstream oversimplification of these theories which separates thinking and action into two very distinct consecutive steps. In reality, I find them to be symbiotic sisters in the process of exploration and experimentation.
Experimenting in action can absolutely inform the thinking process. Small steps give us real-world feedback, and that feedback can spark new ideas. But in a fast-paced, momentum-first culture, the pressure to do can crowd out the space to imagine. We’re told to stop overthinking and just start, so we can be tempted to skip the part where we dream, wonder and play with what might be possible. And for anyone already caught in fear, perfectionism or the weight of high-stakes decisions, “just take action” can make things worse. It might push us to have an answer before we’ve let ourselves explore, and the pressure to get it right only grows.
Creativity researchers distinguish between divergent thinking, which opens up possibilities, and convergent thinking, which narrows them down (J.P. Guilford). “Just take action” asks us to converge before we’ve let ourselves diverge.
I regularly see the benefit of divergent thinking during the first sessions with a new client. They arrive with a heaviness of self-judgement, a sense that they should know what they want by now. When they set aside what’s realistic and simply play with what could be, something shifts. Thoughts, feelings, ideas they’ve never said out loud start finding a voice, and there’s an energy that wasn’t there before. Nothing has been decided, no action has been taken, yet they leave already lighter. Just by voicing new possibilities and indulging in what might be, they’ve reconnected with a part of themselves that knows there’s more.
So if you’re feeling stuck, the first step might not be a step at all. It might be giving yourself permission to pause and create the best conditions for you to dare to imagine.
