What if it goes right?

Imagine how powerful it could be to assume the best, not the worst

A friend recently told me about their plans for setting up their own business. They’ve been thinking about it on and off for years and as we came out of the pandemic, they told me that it seemed like a good time to make it happen.

But strangely, although she was clearly passionate about the idea and ready to work at it -

All I could hear her saying was ‘But what if it goes wrong?’

What if I start the business and things don’t work out? Businesses go under all the time.

But what if it goes right?

What if I go with this supplier and it goes wrong and they end up leaving me in the lurch?

But what if it goes right?

You get the drift.

This anxiety and focus on the negative can apply to any situation where you have to make a ‘big’ decision, such as accepting a job offer, getting into a new relationship or moving house.

Decisions can be hard because they are full of unknowns and risks. Often, we don’t know what we don’t know, and that can be nerve-wracking and hard to accept. But we can’t know everything.

Sometimes we have to take a leap of faith or, to put it another way, jump and accept that we might fall…or land gracefully. We can choose to think positively.

Yes, we have to be practical and realistic with our dreams and ambitions if we want to make them happen, but constantly focusing on the potential negative outcomes doesn’t help. In fact, it keeps us trapped, it allows us to procrastinate and gives us permission not to try.

My go-to question in this scenario is ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ My friend, not surprisingly, answered, ‘It could fail!’ Yes, it could, but I asked her what she could do to try and ensure it didn’t. I asked her what she wanted more, where she is now or where she could be.

Typically, when I ask, ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ clients start listing everything that could go wrong to demonstrate why they shouldn’t take action, but we then move on through gentle challenges to their thinking with questions like ‘What is the actual impact of that?’ and ‘How else could you look at this?’.

Through these exploratory conversations, clients can realise that they are telling themselves it will all go wrong because they are afraid.

They may have limiting beliefs about their ability to succeed, fears they have generated or have taken on board from others, and genuine concerns about the risks, but what is interesting when they hear their fears played back to them is that they lose their power.

Where does that fear come from? Is it still true now? How does it help you to believe that?

Of course, there are no guarantees of success. I do not belong to the cheesy, simplistic and perhaps even potentially toxic ‘positivity is everything’ school of thought, but from a purely practical point of view, I often wonder –

How differently could things turn out if we focus on the positive factors of our situation? It takes just as much energy to focus on something positive as it does on something negative.

To move forward, we need a balance of both.

And even if the result is not what we would have wanted, we would have at least spent our time more constructively, wanting something good to happen as opposed to doing nothing by expecting something bad to happen. Or living in the stasis of 'maybe one day' and staying stuck.

I know which I would prefer. What about you?

If you’d like help to move forward and gain a more positive perspective on your career, why not contact me and see where a session of Career Therapy can take you? Contact me for a free intro chat via the website.

Click ‘Book a call’ on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk

And check out my other posts on the non-woo-woo approach to the power of positive thinking, including The power of choosing to be positive and What if? Not every is negative. There is also the Positive Intelligence approach to addressing negativity by understanding your mental well-being saboteurs.

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