What to do when you feel like giving up on your inspired work

When I was young, I received some “bad advice” from Corey Hart. I don’t know how global his musical reach is, but if you don’t know who he is, Corey Hart is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose hit singles topped the charts way back in the early 80s. My mom, bless her, indulged my young teenage fandom and accompanied me to several of his concerts. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t know how she managed being in an arena filled with screaming teenagers. It would overwhelm me. However, back then, I stood on my chair like everyone else, crooning along to his sugary pop songs.

When it was time in his set for the sentimental ballad “Never Surrender”, the lighters would all come out and the crowd would sway to the music with heartfelt earnest. It’s a song about hope and resilience, however, upon my more aged reflection, I don’t think surrender is the right word. To me, the song should have been titled “Never Give Up”, but I get that just doesn’t have the same resonance. Or enough syllables. That’s why I’m not a songwriter.

Nonetheless, I wish I had learned the difference between surrender and giving up when I was much younger. It might have saved me from years of heartache.

When the going gets tough

I’ve been doing this work in some capacity for almost 15 years now and throughout that time I have achieved many successes and failures. Even though it makes for terrible marketing, I often say that living one’s inspired work is the most difficult work you will ever do. This is because it will challenge you to confront every single aspect of yourself you are holding in limitation. It will expose every fear, every internal block, every false story, every belief in your own lack. And because there is no one else to hold responsible but yourself, you will have no choice than to meet, dismantle, overcome, and release these limitations. So, not only do you have to keep up with the outer work you are doing in the world, you also have to continuously be doing your inner work. Every day, you’re on double shift. In some ways, yes, it would be easier just to “get a job”. However, if you’re like me, that would be the death of your heart and soul, so it wouldn’t be a life worth living, anyway.

Living one’s inspired work is the most difficult work you will ever do because it will challenge you to confront every single aspect of yourself you are holding in limitation.

Even though I am thoroughly comfortable navigating both the inner and outer realms these days, earlier in my business, at a particularly crucial pivotal point, I did something that made my progress far more gruelling than necessary. When the going got tough, I didn’t “get going” – I went. I gave up on my business. No, there’s no need for me to see the reproachful look on your face. I promise you, I’ve beaten myself up plenty about it over the years. In giving up, I made my journey that much more arduous by only having to start all over again years later.

When I first started this business in 2010, I had an actual brick and mortar space for my school and I taught my programs in person. I also taught business and self-employment skills at several other schools, so it made my marketing quite effortless. I simply had to show up in those other schools, do good work, be myself, and those who felt called to work with me, came to me. However, in 2015, that all changed. I became no longer interested in teaching elsewhere, I just wanted to do my own work, so I quit those other gigs. Of course, that meant what once provided a steady flow of clients to my business, no longer existed.

Something else had also changed at that time. I had moved out of the big city to live on a small, rural island. I was ready to embrace a slower lifestyle and forego the hustle of the daily commute into town. That was when I made the decision to pivot my business to go online. It was years before the pandemic so it was still relatively uncharted waters. “Zoom” had not yet become a household name. I remember pre-pandemic how many people would wave me off because they felt it too awkward to work online. Gladly, that’s changed now.

But what was required of me then was to make the shift from marketing my work in person, which was easy, to marketing my business online, which I didn’t yet know how to do. My sales plummeted. After already having spent years building up my business, it was like having to start all over again, and I let it take the wind out of my sails. The worst part was I allowed my failure to mean there was something wrong with me and my work. Instead of approaching the change in environment as an opportunity for growth and expansion, which is what it was, I crumpled. What would have served me better than giving up, however, would have been to surrender.

Never give up

When we are doing something new, especially for the first time, it’s not easy to keep going in the face of failure. All of our stories of lack and limitation grow larger in our minds, crowding out any thoughts of hope and resilience. All we see is evidence of our own incapacity and unworthiness. What is true, however, is that we are not the problem. There actually is no problem, we are simply in the early stages of our creative process, and our failures are helping us to move along.

Failure is not a term of judgement, it just means something didn’t happen in the way we expected it to happen. But that does not mean it went wrong. In fact, failure is usually an indication of something going right. It’s an elegantly-designed divine course corrector, if we let it be.

I’m actually happy these days when my clients have an early failure in their growth process. It’s like ripping off the bandaid. Once the thing they feared actually happens, then they can take their foot off the brake and stop holding themselves back. “Good,” I say. “Now we can get to work.”

The action that triggers my own residual pain is when I see my clients walk away when their journey gets difficult. From the sidelines, I want to shout, “Wait! No, don’t give up! You’ve got this! Keep going!” I don’t want them to make their future life harder than it needs to be. I also don’t want them to live with the same regrets I have. Of course, that’s not for me to decide. Their path is up to them.

Giving up is the belief that the situation is hopeless and that we are powerless to affect change.

But here’s the advice I would like to dole out before they disappear into radio silence. When you are faced with a failure in your work, it does not mean you are on the wrong path. But also, you don’t want to keep doing the same things. You have to adapt and adjust to the feedback being presented to you. You have to assess what’s not working, learn from it, make changes, and then continue forward.

But often, we are so bound up in our own wounds and limitations, that we can’t mentally get at the information we need to make the appropriate changes. That’s why we must learn how to surrender to our inner knowing.

Always surrender

When I was at the crucial point in my work journey, instead of learning from my failures and making adjustments, I resorted to an old pattern of behaviour. In the face of difficulty, I tend to create something entirely new. This may sound like a positive attribute, and it is, but only if I use it to create the next step in my journey, not when I use it as an avoidance technique. It used to be that I would move through the early stages of the creative process and then when I bumped up against a particularly sticky bit, I would just start over. This pattern stunted my growth. It meant my work was forever in the gestation and sprouting phase, but was never able to reach the stage of actual blossoming. After years of this self-inflicted frustration, I finally had to succumb to the art of surrender.

Before I came to that awareness, though, and still smarting from the sting of my misperceived inadequacy, I directed my energy into building a new venture. I gathered a collective of outdoor enthusiasts and sporting experts and hired them to offer nature-based adventures on the fair little isle where we all lived. It was a modest business, but it provided a blessed lifestyle. But when the pandemic came along, it ended that business overnight. Four years of work, gone. I faced failure, yet again. But this time, I knew what I had to do. I put my hands in the air and went along for the ride. I surrendered to what was obvious. It was time for me to return to doing this work fully again, but this time, I was going to trust myself.

To surrender requires trust. We have to trust ourselves enough to follow our inner knowing even though we don’t know where it is leading us. Even before that, we have to trust that we have an inner knowing and that it is guiding us toward the fulfillment of our desires. The challenge, as always, is that there is no guarantee of “success” when we arrive, but that’s because we don’t actually ever “arrive” somewhere in particular. Our path simply continues to evolve. That is, if we allow it to. Our surrender requires a constant opening, receiving, and moving step-by-tiny-step in the direction where we feel the impulse to go.

Surrender is the belief that the situation is hopeful and that through yielding to our own inner power we can realize our desires.

It’s true that sometimes our inner knowing leads us down a different path than the one we were on. But to evolve our work in a new direction because it is better serving is a much different experience than giving up and changing lanes because the path becomes difficult. If I had known the difference those many years ago, I would be in a much different place now. Perhaps.

…

I understand there is such a thing as divine timing and that we, our human selves, aren’t always in control of the unfolding of our journey. There are other factors at play that are oftentimes out of our conscious awareness. It’s also true that there were other experiences I needed to have so that I could step into this work more wholly and with more conviction. However, I still regret giving up on myself. I set my business back years in progress. I wish I had trusted myself enough to follow what was being presented to me at the time. But I didn’t. I no longer beat myself up about it, though. I’ve accepted that now is my time. I also believe that now is our time. It is the perfect time for everyone to be discovering, creating, and living their inspired work. Given what’s happening on our planet, we have a whole new world to birth. That means there is much new work to create and it’s not going to be easy.

To create something that’s never existed before is hard. Plain and simple. When it comes to business, it takes years to master all of the pieces that have to be put into place - your offers, your message, your sales, your promotions, your communications, your marketing. But if you surrender to your own inner knowing and allow yourself to be guided through the process, you will eventually emerge from the dark tunnel of creation into work that is fruitful for both you and humanity-at-large.

Semantics aside, the message of Corey Hart’s song is the same message I am wanting to convey. In spite of facing setbacks and heartache, you must not give up on yourself. If you are at a point on your inspired work journey where you want to give up, let my story embolden you to take your next step. And your next step after that. The version of you that is 15 years older than you are now will be bowing at your feet and thanking you for having the courage to surrender and to keep carving out your own path.

Don’t give up. You’ve got this. Keep going.