A Spell to Let Yourself Give It a Try

What question comes to mind when you’re thinking about trying something new? If it’s “will this work?” this spell is for you. Together, we’re going to unpack why our concept of what “works” is so limited, and how opening up to new possibilities can start with redefining a single word.

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If you give yourself space to understand WHY you want to do something new, it can transform your concept of what it means for it to work. If your whys are in integrity with your values and your desires, even learning what not to do is a valuable lesson that will serve you when you’re ready to try again.

Transcript: A Spell to Let Yourself Give It a Try

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Hi, there. Hoo, I’ve just returned from a long walk. This is how I have been doing summer. I have been taking a nice, long sweaty walk almost every morning. There is a lovely little creek about a seven-minute walk from my house and nice trails that go alongside it. And I am not only walking in the mornings alongside the creek; I’m also almost always doing it without my phone. My friend, I’m going for a walk for like an hour and change, without my phone. So no headphones, no podcast in my head, no Voxer exchanges, just me and birds and my thoughts. And it’s been so great! I hope I stay on this kick. I never know with me [laughs], but I hope I stay on this kick.

Anyway, I just got back from a nice, long walk, and the whole time, I was thinking about what I’m about to share with you, a spell for letting yourself give it a try. This is partly inspired by a couple of clients I’ve been working with, a couple of clients who are ready to strike out in a new direction. One of them is creating a new offer, a very different thing for her, and another one is figuring out a more self-honoring way to market her business. In both cases, here are people who are really wanting to do something differently. And, in both cases, both of these clients really, really, really want the new thing to work. These are people who go all-in when they go, and these are people who are coming out of an offer and a way of marketing that didn’t really work, right? And so they're really wanting for this next endeavor to succeed.

And, maybe you resonate with this. Maybe you are also wanting to make some kind of change. You're wanting to do something differently. You're wanting to invest your energy in a new direction, a new project, a different way of working, or collaborating, or making money, whatever it is. And perhaps you too are hung up on the question, “But what if it doesn't work?” And [laughs] I’ll just tell you right now, whenever I’m working with someone, and they say, “I’m afraid it might not work,” this is what I say. It’s so reassuring. I say, “Yeah. It might not work.” Let’s be real, you and me. We've lived on planet Earth long enough to know that sometimes, it doesn't work. And almost never does it work the way we think it will. Yeah? When we take something out of our heads and into co-created reality, when we take it out of our heads and into the world, things—don’t go the way we expect they will. Because how could we possibly expect all of the myriad co-creative responses to what it is that we're offering? Yeah?

So, an important foundation of this spell, to let yourself give it a try, is to allow for the very real possibility that it might not work, and to accept—maybe even embrace, but at least accept [laughs]—that it almost definitely won’t work the way you are thinking it will, or hoping it will. So, I love to begin there. And then I love to remember that our minds so readily present to us a binary: it works, or it doesn't work; it’s successful or it’s not successful. Right? That like yes or no, good or bad, binary. And it always behooves us to reject a binary and instead to live in what I think we all find is much more the reality. The reality is that whatever happens is probably going to be in between. Some parts will work, and some parts won’t. Very likely there will be some things we like and enjoy and want to build on, and other things we don’t like and we'll want to let go of. Right? Remembering that we are always existing in creative response, that reality is evolving, reality is unrolling, and we are evolving, we are unrolling with it, is super important, and I think makes it easier to exist in the in-between. In between “it works” and “it doesn't work” is really where the creation and the growth and the figuring out and the life happens. Yeah?

You know, I do love a Pareto principle. Do you know the Pareto principle? That’s the 80/20 rule. I really do like that. And it doesn't have to be exactly 80/20, but I really enjoy thinking of it as like, well, maybe it’s going to 80% work, and maybe it’s going to 20% work, but I know that I exist in creative response to whatever happens, and so I can take what works and I can learn from and I can build on that. So, embracing the reality that, yeah, it might not work, and it probably won’t work the way you think it will, and then trusting that you will be able to take what works and use it for you. And then, three—and, I don’t know, maybe this even should have been one, but, for what it’s worth—I do also like to ask, how do we know if something has worked? How do you know if something has been successful or not?

The example that came to me of this as I was walking and sweating today [laughs] was, once upon a time, I settled on becoming a yoga teacher, and I really wanted that career to work for me. So, I trained as a yoga teacher. I bought and ran a yoga studio. I offered all kinds of different yoga classes. And was I successful? Well, I had a lot of students. And, I did support myself teaching yoga. And-slash-but, I didn’t really enjoy it. Or at least I didn’t enjoy it for long. It wasn’t really what I thought it would be. It didn’t feel the way I thought it would feel. And, retrospectively, I took the parts I liked the most, which were the more kind of psycho-emotional self-compassion self-love, personal growth parts of yoga, I took those and I built on them, and that’s how eventually I became a coach instead of a yoga teacher.

But, you know, like if you looked at me right now, and you saw that I have nothing at all to do with yoga—like I don’t teach yoga at all; I don’t even practice yoga, anymore—you might think, “Well, that didn’t work. Teaching yoga for Natalie didn’t work.” However, teaching yoga for me was foundational in my journey to becoming a coach. I discovered this world from that world. That’s number one. And then number two, my ability to use my voice, when I am presenting, when I am recording this podcast, my ability to use my voice in the way that I use it is entirely the result of having taught yoga classes for a decade. I learned to do this, there. I have no doubt about that. And then finally, my ability to hold space for a group. I began to understand that in graduate school, as a teacher. But where I really honed the skill, to hold space for a group of people, where I’m creating a collective experience but I’m also attending to each individual, I also learned that, teaching yoga.

So, yeah, you could say, “Natalie has nothing to do with yoga anymore, so I guess it didn’t work for her to spend a decade of her life invested in that work.” Or you could say, “Oh, that totally worked. [laughs]. Like it really worked! That gave Natalie”—and why I have shifted to talking about myself in the third person, I don’t know—but “That gave Natalie perspective and skills that she absolutely needed for her next evolution.” So, in addition to rejecting the binary of “it worked” or “it didn’t work,” I think another thing that we need to do is we need to expand the criteria, expand our definition, of what quote-unquote “working” is, of what success is.

And I think it would actually be helpful for you to do that right now. You can think back to something that you tried, and it didn’t end up being what you wanted, or it didn’t end up being your thing. Look back to something that you tried and it didn’t work, and say, “Okay, but how did it work for me? What did I get from that? What about that endeavor or that experience was foundational for me, moving forward?” So once we've moved beyond the kind of question of “But is it going to work?” and we've gotten more real and sophisticated and nuanced about our answer to that question, then I think we can shift our attention to questions that are more energizing, and motivating, and inspiring. So one of those questions would be, well, why? Why do you want to try? Why do you want to do this?

For my client who is creating a new offer, she’s like, “Well, I really want to figure out how to integrate both of the skills that I have into one way of working. I’m sick of them being separate. I want them to come together.” She can see that they might be complementary and she wants to try. And maybe even more importantly, she loves doing both of the things, and she doesn't want the complexity of having basically two separate businesses anymore. She wants one thing that she’s doing.

Or, my client who is figuring out a new way of marketing—why? Why do you want to do this? She’s like, “Well, because I do want to help people, and I understand that in order to help people and to reach people, I need to market. And, I want to do this in a way that feels good to me. I don’t want to follow all the formulas and systems and launch strategies, all of that bullshit, right? I want to do it in a way that feels good and fun to me.” So, notice here that the answers to the why, when an answer is in integrity, it’s usually a combination of “I want” and also kind of seeing values coming to life.

So, for my client creating one offer, she wants to do that, and she’s bringing more ease, more simplicity, into her work. For my client figuring out the new way to market, she wants to do it, and she’s bringing more generosity and more fun into her work. So, when you're thinking about trying something, rather than thinking, “Eh, is it going to work or is it not going to work?” I think it’s so much better to ask, “Why do I want to do this?”

If your reason for trying something is that you think you should, if your reason for trying is that someone else told you to do it, or everyone else is doing it—if it is a should and not a want—and, if the thing is not aligned with your values, if it’s not helping you to be the person you want to be or grow in the direction you want to grow, then it’s very likely that the only way this endeavor is going to work is to show you what not to do, is to give you a big lesson in “Here’s what happens when you move in a direction out of integrity with your desires and your values.” Now, notice I’m still declaring that it is going to work, in some way, because I think those lessons are important. I mean, listen, I have had scores of them, scores of lessons in, “Well, not that way,” or “Not that thing,” or “Not that direction,” and that is okay.

Okay, my friend, there you have it, a spell for letting yourself give it a try. And, I’ll just close with this. Something that’s happening on those morning walks—super early, because it gets hot here, and humid, so I’m going really, really early, and I’m in the early morning light, with the birdies, and the dew on the grass, all the beauty—something that’s happening is I am waking up literally on a daily basis to remember that this really is so precious, this time on Earth that we have, and that is so easy to forget when we are bogged down with our errands, and responsibilities, and just the hustle, bustle of 21st century life. But walking in the mornings, I’m just struck by, wow, I want to make the most of this. This is a limited time offer, this life that I have. And I don’t want to wait and I don’t want to wonder if it would have worked, or if I would have liked it, or what would have happened. I don’t want those questions. I want to go for it. And I think the best parts of this cocreated world of ours, the best books and shows and recipes and gadgets, they all started with people who let themselves give it a try. So we should too. Thank you so much for listening, as always, and bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show. Or, if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday letter at MindWitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, Executive Producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.

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