Trust Your Gut

As professionals, we know our stuff, right? Well, we at least pretend to. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself second guessing what I’m doing. Sometimes we under value our own expertise, experience and instincts more than we should. It’s time to stop. It’s time to start trusting our gut.

You did what?

At BizStream we decided to take a completely different approach to a web project. Granted it wasn’t a very large project, but nonetheless it was an unorthodox approach (for us). We wanted to take an existing logo, some existing content and come up with a design with no project brief, no long drawn out client meetings. Oh yeah, did I mention we wanted to see if we could get it done (design, client approval, integration into Kentico CMS) in less than 8 hours? Stupid, right? I know, but it was surprisingly refreshing.

This time I did something different. I didn’t have time for the usual inspiration hunting, wireframing and then Photoshop’n. Instead, I locked myself in my office, turned off Twitter, turned off IM, cranked up the “rdio” and started Photoshop’n. I went with my gut instincts, with what I know.

Half way through the home page design, I started to fall into my normal routine of hating where I was going and arguing with myself that “this is never going to make the home page of Dribbble”, and “I’m never gonna be as good as [insert hot designer here], so what am I doing?”. I didn’t have time for this BS. My timeline didn’t care if I was going to make the front page of Dribbble. I needed a serious gut check.

I didn’t scrap my original direction. I kept pushing and kept trusting what I know. With 13 minutes left to spare, we had client approval and full integration into Kentico CMS.

Listen to that gut

This made me think, how much time do we waste not trusting ourselves, not believing in ourselves, throwing ourselves pity parties or listening to those demons telling us to stop? We all have room for improvement, but if you’ve been doing this long enough, it’s time to start trusting your gut. You know what you’re doing, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it this far.

What made Michael Jordan the best NBA player of all time? His willingness to trust his gut on when to dribble one more time or pull-up and take that game winning shot, his willingness to trust his gut that he was going to make it.

Challenge yourself. Find a project where you have to rely on what you’ve learned this far, and believe in it. Put yourself up against the wall and just do it. See what happens and see if you come out more confident. I’m not going to approach every project this way, but a little pressure forcing me to trust myself is going to make me a heck of a lot more confident going forward.

Extra

For those of you that are interested in the project, BizStream launched BlastAhead.com, a small business consulting firm here in Grand Rapids, MI. Tom came to us with a logo, a little bit of content about BlastAhead, and a small bio. Tom and BizStream are both really happy with the results.

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010