Detaching from the Outcome

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love a challenge. I love a goal. My most recent challenge was trying to eat up the weird stuff I have in my pantry. You know the stuff— the protein powder you regretted buying. The weird can of beef stew that someone gave you. (I documented it on Instagram, if you’re curious!)

I knew going into it that this challenge probably wouldn’t “perform well” with my audience, but it’s something that I wanted to do for a couple of reasons. I wanted to draw attention to food insecurity. I 100% firmly believe that food is a right and no one should go hungry. I also wanted to see if I could do it. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to content creation. I don’t crank out videos like so many creators because my projects usually take a lot of time, a significant amount of editing and to be honest, my iPhone is not very good. I sometimes have to wait for sunny days or just the right light. But I did it anyway! I posted every weekday for a week and yeah, it didn’t perform very well. And yeah, it’s not visually my best work. But that’s not the point. The point is that I proved to myself that I could do it and worked on detaching from the outcome.

I’m working on detaching from the outcome in other areas of my life too. I’ve started writing a novel. (I know, it sounds so grown up and maybe a bit pretentious.) And my first instinct was to get ahead of myself. I started looking into how to query a book, the process of getting a literary agent, etc. But I stopped myself. I’m not in that part yet. I’ve only written about 30 pages and the plot isn’t even completely fleshed out in my head.

I’m trying to be ok with the fact that it might not get published. There’s so many good books out there that don’t get published. In fact, one of my favorite (new to me) authors started out as a self-published author. There’s also a lot of kind of bad books that do get published. (I’ve read lots of them!) So, I need to be ok with writing something that I’m proud of, regardless of the outcome.

So how can you detach from the outcome? I hate to tell you this, friends, but it’s just practice. Practice something low stakes. Try a new craft project and enjoy the process of crafting— the goal is not to have something worthy of being sold. That’s capitalism talking! Detach from the process and make the goal simply practicing something new. Remind yourself that the process is for you, your enjoyment only and the outcome is unimportant. I have to tell myself this so, so many times a day. Quite frankly it’s embarrassing how much I have to tell myself this, but we’re processing and that’s a process too!