The Importance of Following Your Heart

Following your heart is crucial for living a fulfilling and authentic life. When you are true to yourself and pursue the things that truly matter to you, you experience a sense of purpose and meaning that helps you to align all around you in a way that finally makes sense be it external validations, material possessions, the job you put your hand up to do, the relationships you have, and your inner purpose that makes your heart determined to keep pursuing… Each element in life will then be tailored to have its place in your life with a synchronicity that can be astounding.

By following your heart, you tap into your unique strengths, passions, and values, and you unlock the potential to create a life that is aligned with your deepest desires.

However, getting out of your own way and overcoming the fears and doubts that hold you back can be a challenge. Before we can follow our heart successfully, let’s focus on internalising some key concepts about our inner critic and tendency to believe we are smarter than we really are.

Understand Your Inner Critic

It’s a common tale: We’re talented, dedicated people with passions, limitless potential and dreams that fill us with excitement and purpose. But on the other hand as we consider the next steps needed to pursue those passions, we are equally capable of overestimating ourselves as experts to something that we are new at then getting disappointed by “reality”, and negging ourselves out of doing something or generating our own issues. This process where we start to listen and give focus to the nagging voice of doubt, with the mind spitting out

“What if you’re not good enough? What if it’s too hard? What if you fail?”

is a damaging inner critic that creates an unhelpful, counter productive and self sabotaging mental loop. If not monitored, and STOPPED in its tracks, it can persist in the mind and wreak havoc on our wellbeing. But with grounded awareness and honest acknowledgement that we are allowing our mind to “go there” again, we then have a chance to break free from this cycle that prevents us from crafting solutions to help us achieve our passions.

Get Good At Recognising What the Self Doubt Mental-Loop Looks Like When You’re In It

If we have been down this debilitating path enough times, we may finally admit and conclude to ourselves that using this self-doubt mental process as our secret “intelligent” method to propel us forward is actually causing us unnecessary turmoil and suffering on levels that we may not even fully see or can fathom.

Check this:

Do you ever struggle with self-doubt that leaves you unable to focus?, thinking “I can’t do this, what if…I should already know this…”? Suddenly, time has passed, you’re behind schedule, a simple task before you no longer seems simple and negative thoughts ensue? Instead of working on your passions, you’re now feeling compelled to spend time hiding your unproductive behavior from others and pretending you have it all together further adds to the stress. Before you know it, your passions seem distant and progress to “follow your heart” seems like a joke. Sound familiar?

Stop Letting the Self Doubt Mental-Loop Run its Course

If you’ve studied and observed yourself enough of every time you’ve let the self doubt mental loop run its course, you may come to see that this mental process does not discriminate. It does not care if you’re a novice or an expert. Once this loop is used by its owner, aka you, it will do its job. Self doubt dialogue on a roll!

It’s not personal and will just run its course if we give it permission to run until we have enough energy left to stop it. Once we are able to admit to ourselves that this method works REALLY well at creating feelings of self-hate, loss of energy/power and is great at distracting us from our goal, may we then choose to finally cease and desist this process and instead surrender our exhausted selves to a process that is more suited to the job of actually keeping our passions alive. That is terms and conditions if we really mean it when we say we want to do what we love, follow our passions, fulfil our heart and dreams. Even if it means letting go of our “habit” of allowing the self doubt mental loop to run its course.

Acknowledge Your Over-Estimation-“I’ve Heard it All Before” Equates to “I Know it All”-Blind Spot

Common narratives and recommendations to “overcome your fears and self doubt” and “follow your heart”, have become repetitive “catchphrases” or appear to be generic solutions that can make one nod their head or roll our eyes like “yes, yes heard this all before”. With this over saturation and repetition of hearing such well intended phrases, we can run the risk of triggering our own cognitive biases to conclude that hearing it X “million” amount of times equates to our X amount of skill in being able to do “it” well.

As in, “I’ve heard it all before, therefore I’m an expert at it”.

This fallacy and cognitive bias is commonly known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger Effect: where we can unintentionally OVER-estimate our ability to do something really well that we’re not skilled in as yet. Or for example, mistakenly concluding after just hearing one great quote by Socrates on social media that we somehow now have the wisdom, true understanding or mastery that he has, when we really haven’t.

This inaccurate view of where we are really at can prevent us as intelligent beings from being open to taking on “simple’ solutions, or being able to accept that we are holding ourselves back just by having an inaccurate view of where we are.

We may want to already be at an ability to follow our heart like an expert, but what if we really are at the point of trying to even master how to stop inner critiquing or self doubting. What if following our hearts becomes natural and “easy” to do once we have successfully removed our process of self doubting and over-estimating.

Oftentimes such over-estimation of our own intelligence can make us unnecessarily defend our insecurities with ‘intellectualised” rationales like “Oh I’m just too smart for my own good” in an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance and discomfort we experience when our actions/reality does not match our own assessment of our ability. We try instead to HOLD ONTO our non acceptance of reality and results showing us where we are at.

In being aware that we have such blind spots as human beings, may we then be more cautious to self manage the conclusions we’ve previously formed and now self assess whether we

TRULY know how to overcome our fears, or able to take action on what needs to be done to “follow the heart”

As opposed to giving power to our cognitive biases, and assume we already know all there is to know and close our minds to such possibilities like:

• There may be more to learn especially when we think we don’t.
• There might be a more effective way to conquer self-doubt than what you may think you know, heard of in theory and have tried.
• There could be a more effective way to pursue your passions without dismissing the idea of following your heart as impossible to achieve just because you had been using the self-doubt mental loop-tool till now.

Exercise Self-Compassion & Honesty

Understandably you may be more used to experiencing a life with self doubt and are new to consistently following your heart. Be patient and honest with how many years you’ve consistently used self doubt mental loop in your seconds, minutes, hours, VS the process of following your heart.

So with anything new and not yet mastered, it won’t feel familiar or easy from the outset. But remain as diligent with it; as diligent if not more as you had been with using the self doubt mental loop. Additionally expect seeing delayed results especially if we are still secretly in the privacy of our own minds still “rewarding” ourselves with moments of self doubt mental loop practices as our “rest time” from “following our heart”.

Let the Follow-Your-Heart Model Guide You to Better Results

What if following your heart, love or passions as a process has not been given a chance to be completely and consistently actioned ESPECIALLY if we are honest about how much we may have employed the self doubt mental loop instead. The time can be now to step up and take the reins to choose your heart, your LOVE. Beware of your own cognitive biases kicking in again upon hearing the recommendation to choose “Love”. Double check yourself of the possibility that you may not be an expert in this area and may not even recognise this energy called Love/Passion due to your proclivity and familiarity with exercising self-doubt mental loops.

When we allow ourselves to follow our love/passions, we then give ourselves the chance to tap into a sense of purpose and authenticity that can fuel us through the hard work and challenges that inevitably come our way. This is just the exciting start.

Conclusion

It’s important to acknowledge that there are risks associated with following our heart, passions and dreams. But haven’t we already risked much by allowing the Self Doubt Mental Loop to control our results and mental health till now? Like with all things, in order to thrive in our daily life, it’s important to remain alert and observant of our surroundings to protect ourselves and the existence of our loves; But the mere fact that something is risky doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put our energy and efforts to do all we can to help it succeed. Often, it’s the risks we take that lead to the biggest personal fulfilment. Like what if we end up feeling the unfamiliar feeling of consistently being happy, feeling purposeful and free to keep growing and creating drama free?

Perhaps open yourself up to the idea that there is no stepping outside of your comfort zone or leaps needed to follow your heart. What if all it takes is to STOP listening to your inner critic’s propaganda. And be open to keep accepting/embracing what life looks like once you no longer allow this self doubt mental loop process to run its course and hold you back.

Allow yourself to thrive and pursue your passions and dreams consistently without also applying self doubt or over-estimation in your process. Let the Follow Your Heart model lead you instead.

See it for yourself. What if the process of following your heart can and will only reveal itself once it is given the space to exist without the presence and constant injection of the self doubt mental loop process?