The Don't Wait Experiment
7 Nonconventional Ways To Close the Gap Between Inspiration and Action
Several years ago, I started an experiment to help my clients reduce overthinking and build trust with their inner voice in the midst of transition and expansion.
It’s called The Don’t Wait Experiment, inspired by the first invitation in Frank Ostaseski’s book The Five Invitations. Ostaseski is the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Group, and he explores five lessons the dying teach us about living.
Invitation #1 asks us to consider a simple question: why do we wait on the things that matter most to us? Ostaseski observed people at the end of their lives finally doing what they had been waiting to do — to forgive, to express themselves, to make a change — and wonders why we don’t get out of the waiting room sooner.
Don’t wait, he writes. Everything we need is right in front of us. Impermanence is the doorway to possibility. Embracing it is where true freedom lies.
Freedom is a potential, yes, but the only guarantee when we stop waiting on something is that we will confront uncertainty. We also live in a culture that wants to keep us there.
The purpose of the Don’t Wait Experiment is to:
1. Disrupt the myth of readiness and defy culturally conditioned limiting beliefs.
The status quo profits when we don’t listen to our inner voice, so it feeds us a narrative that we must wait — to be ready, to be worthy, to be certain — so it can sell us solutions to problems it invented.
2. Expand our relationship with uncertainty and our history of courage
It yields miraculous results. The problem is that I also have to do it. I am highly skilled at helping other people get out of their waiting rooms and even have some fun in the process. I am significantly less skilled at getting myself out of my own. (Even though the best things in my life have emerged from nonlinear leaps).
This experiment is medicine for a recovering perfectionist!
Invitation #4: Don’t Wait
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Connect with your Inner Voice (This is paramount. We do not expand when we act on someone else’s plans for us, or when we override our sense of inner timing — if your Inner Voice tells you to wait on something, it’s right)
Step 2: Choose an area of your life that you would like to see change or movement in. As it relates to this area of your life, consider: What have you been waiting for that you would like to stop waiting for? What permission does your Future Self have that you want? In what ways might you be overcomplicating this? What is your inner voice directing you to do?
Step 3: Pick ONE thing from your list that your Inner Voice is telling you to explore. What is one way that you will get moving? That’s your experiment.
In the movies, when the heroine finally does the thing she’s been waiting to do, her whole life changes instantly and her happy ending begins. But in real life, it’s sometimes like…so now what? I summoned my courage and all the things that are beyond my control aren’t yet delivering! Or even worse — people don’t seem to be happy with me when I take an authentic risk! So we start to wonder was it even worth it because at this point we are really sweating so much and feeling emotionally naked and exhausted from feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
Here are 2 under-recognized gifts when we stop waiting:
- The act of putting a marble in the trust jar with your inner voice is invaluable and will compound. Regardless of the outcome, you have expanded your courage and in so doing, strengthened a trust muscle that will keep supporting you for the rest of your life.
- Energy is released and creativity is generated. Creativity requires movement and stagnates in the waiting room. Closing a decision loop or ending a pattern of overthinking liberates flow to move through the creative cycle which will benefit whatever the thing is and ripple out to all the other areas of your life.
But remember when I said I’m not great at doing this? Since overthinking is my favorite after-school activity and a part of me would really just rather do the WAIT experiment, here are some things that help:
7 Ways to Close the Gap Between Inspiration and Action:
1. Unconditional Mattering
No amount of action, bravery, or excellence will make me more worthy. I am not the sum of my doings.
As someone who has spent most of her life operating from the belief that in order to be loved, I must be exceptional, I remind myself that getting out of the waiting room will not make me more worthy of love and belonging. This means my perfectionist ego is less excited about whatever the thing is and therefore less invested in making me wait until it’s perfect since my lovability isn’t on the line.
2. We are the greenlight
Even though we may collaborate with others or seek their support in the process, we do not require anyone else’s permission to get out of the waiting room. We are the source of permission.
3. Just move
I can walk out fast with my Aries Rising energy or crawl like the turtle that lives in the center of my heart. My pace, plans (or lack thereof), do not matter. My perfectionism expands when I wait and diminishes the second I start moving.
4. Success = learning
The only point of an experiment is to learn. I learn nothing from excessive waiting. I learn what I need to know by opening the door and walking through it.
5. We need clarity courage
My inner voice has given me a clear answer that it’s time to move. My perfectionism doubts the answer so then holds a press conference communicating to all my parts that we are UNCLEAR. Which then spreads a false message that our inner objective is clarity, when it’s actually courage.
6. Embody your future self
Research conducted out of Johns Hopkins suggests that acting as if we are our future selves accelerates the results in our current reality. I’ll take it. My future self is way more relaxed than I am, and embodying her makes me feel more present and less anxious.
7. Don’t walk out alone
Picture yourself in a waiting room for a moment — so often, it is the walk from the chair to the door where you are headed next when the anxiety kicks up the most. We need each other. We are the greenlight but we don’t need to
But I know a lot about this since my other favorite after-school activity is going it alone instead of asking for help.
So I want you to know that I’m supporting you and championing you.
You are amazing, and your creativity matters. Sometimes getting out of the waiting room is recognizing that your voice and gifts are very, very needed.
Love,
Liz
PS: What would your Don’t Wait Experiment be? How is the concept of a waiting room showing up in your world right now?
A RESOURCE FOR US:
Fall of Freedom is a nationwide wave of creative resistance being organized here in the US this November, founded on the idea that art and creativity are necessary for preserving democracy. You can organize an event or participate in one.
3 Quotes:
1.“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” — AUDRE LORDE
2. “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” — REBECCA SOLNIT
3. “There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself...and if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…” — HOWARD THURMAN
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So much resonated me here, especially how success = learning. I feel like a very successful person!