What If It Does Work?
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
I want to start with a question and I want you to notice what happens in your body when you hear it. Think about that version of your business you want to build. What if it does not work? What happened? Did you feel a bit tense, a bit anxious, a bit fearful? Maybe a little sad or frustrated? Or maybe you felt nothing at all, in which case I have questions and I am slightly in awe of you. But whatever you felt, you are not the only one. Every founder has been in that same boat, thinking about what happens if it all goes wrong. It is, if nothing else, a very crowded boat.
That Question Sounds Like Caution but It Is Running a Filter You Did Not Ask For
The question has a specific kind of weight to it, a heaviness that makes you pause before you begin, or reconsider something you were almost certain about, or hold back just a little from the thing you were about to do. It sounds like caution and it presents itself as sensible, responsible even, the kind of clear eyed thinking that stops you from making mistakes. But what I would like you to consider is whether that question is actually serving you, or whether it has been running in the background ever so quietly, filtering out possibilities before you have even had a chance to properly consider them.
When I stepped into coaching, the what if it doesn’t work question arrived and made itself very much announced. Coaching requires you to believe, deep down and without too many caveats, that you can help someone, that what you know and what you have lived and what you see in other people’s businesses is genuinely valuable, and that the person sitting across from you will leave better than they arrived. For someone with a long history of people pleasing, the question that showed up was not what if people don’t like me. It was something more specific. What if people do not see the value in what I can bring? What if I cannot help them in the way I believe I can? Every version of that question, every derivative, every different way you can say it, all arrived at once..
Your Brain Is Wired to Ask the Negative Version First
Defaulting to the negative question is not a sign of weakness or a lack of faith in yourself. It is your wiring. Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to scan for threats, to anticipate danger, to notice what could go wrong before it does, because the ancestors who were most alert to risk were the ones who survived long enough to pass on those genes. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated through decades of research that we feel potential losses roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains, a phenomenon they called loss aversion. It explains precisely why the what if it doesn’t work question arrives so automatically and feels so compelling and takes up so much more space in your head before you have even attempted the thing you are considering. It is not a character flaw. It is a human brain being a human brain.
The Flip That Changes Everything
Gradually, through a deliberate practice of catching that question when it arrived and asking a different one instead, I managed to turn it around. Instead of what if they do not see the value, I would ask what if they do see the value. What if I can help them in exactly the way I believe I can. What if it actually works. And every time I made that flip, something opened up. The best way I can describe it is a spaciousness, a sense of more room to think, more room to imagine, more room to move towards something rather than constantly bracing against something.
And once you are standing inside that positive version of the question, a second question naturally arrives, and this one is even more powerful. What can I actually do to make sure it does? The original question positions you as somebody waiting for an outcome, bracing for disappointment, at the mercy of things outside your control. This second question puts you in the driving seat. It asks you to look at what is within your control: the quality of your work, the consistency of your outreach, the clarity of your offer, the decisions you make every day. There will always be variables you cannot control, timing, the economy, whether the right people see the thing at the right time. But directing your energy towards the things you can control rather than the things you cannot makes all the difference.
So the next time the question what if it doesn’t work arrives, and it will because it is annoyingly punctual in its arrival and never invited, notice it. Name it for what it is. Thank it for showing up. And then ask the one you actually want to ask: what if it actually does work? And then: what can I do to make sure it does? Those two questions, asked in that order, will always take you somewhere more useful and more expansive than the one you started with.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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