Why You Can’t Make Yourself do the Thing
Dear Sara on Self-Trust and What Actually Helps
There’s a question I get asked all the time, and it’s one I recognise like a very old foe, the kind that stalks your nightmares and fills your waking fears.
(Well, maybe not quite that dramatic but, you get the idea.)
It’s often wrapped in a weird kind of shame, as if the person asking already suspects the answer is their fault.
And what is that question?
“I know what I want to do. So why can’t I make myself do it?”
So, this month to combat this we’re tackling questions on self trust, which is the real reason many of us stop or sit with a growing pile of half finished things. We’re talking about what it actually means to be someone who finishes (and spoiler, it’s nothing to do with willpower).
We’re also going to look at that version of yourself who used to create without asking permission, and how you can find your way back to that.
So, grab a cuppa and let’s get into it.
Dear Sara, I know exactly what I want to create. I can see it clearly. I even know where to start. So why do I sit down to do it and then just don’t? It doesn’t make sense.
Oh, it makes perfect sense, but it makes sense in a different way to the way you’re expecting.
Before you start self deprecating, let’s get one thing straight immediately. This isn’t a motivation problem, it isn’t a discipline or a confidence problem and it’s not even a time problem, although time is probably what you’re blaming it on.
It’s actually a self-trust problem.
And that difference matters. Because, if it were just a motivation issue the answer would be to find more of it. If it were about discipline the answer would be to find better routines. But, this is about something much more subtle and specific.
It’s about all those times you sat down to do your creative work and didn’t, or started and stopped again, or even if you did finish, you discounted it.
What’s actually going on is your nervous system has paid attention and kept score.
Every unfinished draft, every discarded idea and every project you never got off the ground have all collected together as evidence. Your mind has decided that based on the evidence you can’t be trusted to follow through. So, when you sit down again with all those good intentions, your inner self looks at all the evidence and asks, are you sure?
This isn’t a weakness, it’s actually a very normal response to a pattern. Your mind has gone into protection mode and it’s trying to save you from disappointment and hurt.
It’s actually the pattern that’s wrong, rather than you being flaky and unreliable.
You’ve been trying to create under pressure, around exhaustion, in the edges of a life that’s already full. You’ve been measuring yourself against a version of creative work that doesn’t exists for anyone, never mind someone with a busy life.
The barrier isn’t that you don’t know what to make. The barrier is the weight of every previous time it didn’t happen. And that weight doesn’t go away through inspiration, motivation or yet another productivity framework. It goes away through small, accumulated proof. Evidence that balances all the ‘didn’t finish’ evidence in the other direction.
One specific thing you can do today
Not this week. Today.
Take the thing you want to create (you know, that one you keep circling round and round) and give yourself five minutes with it.
Set a timer.
No goal, no perfect output, no pressure to continue afterwards.
Just five minutes of contact.
Just sit with the idea that you’re not creating, you’re just making contact.
What you’re doing here is placing one small piece of evidence on the other side of the scales. It’s not a dramatic piece, it’s a real one. And, real evidence, repeated in small doses, is the only thing that rebuilds self-trust.
I do this with my writing. I specifically call it ‘writing practice’ because that way it allows my brain to believe it’s okay because we’re just practicing. And, if I practice in small doses it balances the scale towards evidence of me actually showing up and do a little regularly.
You don’t need more clarity about what you want to create. You already have that. You need to start believing that you’re the kind of person who does it. And, that belief only comes from doing, even in the tiniest pieces.
Five minutes. Not because it will change everything, but because it will change the story, one small piece of evidence at a time.
Sara
Dear Sara, I have about fifteen unfinished writing projects on my hard drive. If I’m honest, it’s probably more. I start things enthusiastically and somewhere in the middle I stop. I’ve started to think finishing isn’t something I’m capable of doing. Is this just who I am?
No. And, I want to be direct about that because it seems like you’ve been carrying this as a verdict on your character, when it’s actually more of a design issue.
Here’s what I mean by that.
All those projects gathering dust on your hard drive probably have one thing in common. They’re all too big. I don’t mean too ambitious in terms of your ability, but too big in terms of what they ask from you. This could be things like uninterrupted time, constant momentum or no other demands on your attention. These projects were designed, even accidentally, for a set of conditions that don’t exist.
This isn’t a you problem, it’s a scope problem.
There’s also something else that happens in the middle of a project that nobody talks about enough. The beginning is energising and exciting because everything is still possible and it’s all new. The idea is pristine because the messy execution of creative work hasn’t happened yet.
Then you get to the messy middle and there’s a seemingly huge gap between what you imagined and what you’re actually making. And, that gap feels like evidence of your own inadequacy rather than just the normal part of making something real. So you stop, not because you’re a quitter but because stopping feels safer than finishing something that might confirm your worst fears about your ability.
This isn’t a personality trait, it’s a very understandable response to a very specific kind of fear.
People who finish things aren’t different from you. They’ve just found a scope that fits their real life, and developed a tolerance for that messy middle bit. Both of those things are learnable. But, you can’t learn that from a big project. Big projects have too much at stake, too much distance between start and done, too many places to get lost.
You learn from something tiny. Something you can hold in one hand.
One specific thing you can do today
Don’t go anywhere near the hard drive.
Instead, I want you to write a piece of flash fiction of 25 words max. It can be about anything, a woman waiting for a bus, a door left open, a sentence someone said that you’ve never forgotten. It doesn’t need a formal beginning, middle and end. It doesn’t even need to be any good, it just needs to feel complete.
25 words, that’s it. Write it, read it back, and then, this is the important part, let yourself call it done.
What you’re doing isn’t a warm-up exercise, instead you’re actually finishing something. You’re placing one small, clean piece of evidence on the other side of the scales. Evidence that you are someone who completes things. And, that evidence, quietly gathered in small doses, is the only thing that rewrites the story.
You are not a person who doesn’t finish. You are a person who has been trying to finish the wrong-sized things under the wrong conditions.
That is a very different problem. And it turns out the solution starts with just 25 words.
Sara
Dear Sara, when I was younger I wrote constantly in notebooks, on scraps of paper, on anything I could find. It felt natural, like breathing. Now I haven’t written anything in years and I genuinely don’t know how to get back. Sometimes I wonder if that person is just gone what can I do?
They aren’t gone, but I think you already know that, because if they were truly gone, the question wouldn’t hurt the way it does.
What you’re describing, the notebooks, writing on anything you could find, that person didn’t disappear. They got buried, slowly, under the weight of a life that needed you to be practical and responsible and productive in ways that left little room for the part of you that wrote just for the pure love of it.
And that burial happens so gradually you barely noticed it. One year the notebook got tidied away because life is busy. Another year you meant to pick it up again but didn’t. And, then at some point the distance between who you are now and who you were then becomes so great it starts to feel like loss rather than a pause.
It starts to feel like grief.
That grief is real, by the way. It deserves to be named. You are not being dramatic or nostalgic, you’re mourning something that mattered, a self you loved and have been missing.
But here’s what I want you to sit with: that younger version of you wasn’t creative because of their age, or because they had fewer responsibilities, or because they were somehow more gifted than you are now. They were creative because they hadn’t yet learned to question whether they were allowed to be. They picked up the pen without asking for permission first.
The only difference between that person then and you now is that now you’re waiting until you feel ready and before you didn’t. Before you just started.
One specific thing you can do today
Find a notebook, any notebook, even an ugly one, even the back pages of something else entirely. Write one sentence. Not the beginning of a project, not a commitment to anything. Just one sentence about something you noticed today, something you felt, something that caught your attention. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to go anywhere.
You’re not trying to become a writer again. You’re just picking up the pen the same way you used to without pressure, without asking permission.
The person you used to be didn’t go anywhere. They’ve been waiting patiently, for you to come back.
Sara
If you’d like to send in your question for the next Dear Sara, reply to this post or drop me a message. Everything is always anonymous.
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