“Why Not?” Do Those Words Motivate You or Cause Doubt?

The other day, a friend told a story of a mentor who once said to her “Why not?” when she doubted she could do something. Two simple words, and yet where do we go from there? Well, typically we launch into a laundry list of excuses. All the reasons why not. And sometimes we can hear as we are saying them how lame they really are. And sometimes they feel very real and very big and we can’t imagine (yet) how we’d ever get past them.

And sometimes the words “Why not?” are so annoying. “Oh, don’t make it sound so easy,” we want to say. And sometimes, at the best of times, our minds turn that question over and over, and the more they turn it, the more everything starts to seem possible, as it did for my friend. And we say, “Yeah, why not?!”

I’d like to tell you that I respond most often with the latter reaction. I wish that were true. There have been plenty of times in my career when I’ve happily declared “Why not?” and thrown myself into something new. But probably more times when I’ve clung to my excuses.

Change is hard. Risk is hard. New steps in new directions are hard. And sometimes we just don’t have the energy to say “Why not?” even when we want to. And, oh, how we want to.

So what then? Do we make ourselves do it, energy or not? Passion or not? Do we trust that people see something in us we don’t see in ourselves? Do we trust that a mentor, especially, knows something we don’t know? Do we leap, when we really just want to sit at the edge a…