Matt Ragland spent years outsourcing his decisions to books, coaches, and therapy instead of trusting himself. He realized he was using external frameworks as crutches and blaming them when things went wrong, which kept him from learning. Real growth comes from making your own choices and owning the results, even when you fail.
Chapters
It took me a long time to believe that I was capable of making good decisions. And I don't mean good decisions like, do I help this person or am I kind? I mean good decisions like, what kind of YouTube video should I create? Or what kind of course should I put together? Or which project should I prioritize? Which task is most important to lead me to the success that I want? I got stuck way too often in the, I'm going to read a lot of books, or I'm going to get coaching, or I'm going to get therapy. And I want to be clear, all of those things are helpful. All of those things matter. They're important. They act as guides. But I do believe now, and have seen through my own experience, that when you start to lean on the advice and guidance of others as a crutch for not taking the type of action, for not developing yourself and building a belief that you can do a thing because you are doing the thing even through the struggles, even through the frustrations, even through the failures. It's through that progress. It's through that action. It's through the intentional decisions that you make and learning from them that allow you to progress and build confidence that I, you, are the type of person that can make good decisions. Now, there are two reasons for me personally, I'm just sharing my own personal experience, that I struggled to like have this confidence in things that I wasn't like confident enough to begin with. And as I've talked with friends, mentors, this is, this is what it was for me. And I've already talked about one. Number one was I like had trouble because I wasn't confident in myself to make good decisions. And so I would just keep looking for external influence, advice, guidance to like put me in the best position to make a decision. Or often it'd be like, hey, I would just be like, Matt, you need to do this. Okay, great. That person made the decision for me. I'm going to go for it. The second thing is much more subtle and subconscious, and it took me even longer to figure this one out. If I got advice from someone else, if I followed someone else's framework, then I had someone to blame when things didn't go right. The other level beyond this that took me even longer to figure out was that it actually hurt my ability to make good decisions, even if it worked out, because it'd be like, oh, what, it only worked because I followed this person's habit, you know, steps. It only worked because I did this thing that, uh, you know, a coach recommended. And again, I think this is a really tricky place to be in because I'll keep saying like Coaching helps, therapy helps, guidance and advice from others helps, but you have to eventually disassociate that advice with the decision that you're making for yourself, or at least be intentional about this is a decision that I am making that I'm intentional about. It is informed by these other people, wise, wise people who are here to help me. But it— you have to be really clear that this is a decision that you're making for yourself and not just a decision you're making like, well, my therapist told me to do this, my coach told me to do this, my, you know, partner, my dad, my mom told me to do this. You can still do things based on that advice, but it's so important to make sure that you're intentional, that decision is coming directly from your place of knowledge and your developing sense of expertise. Speaking of good decisions, one of the best decisions that I've made is setting up the Digital Dads community on Mighty Networks, because Mighty Networks does an amazing job of reducing some of the decisions that I don't necessarily have to make and highlighting the things that are important to consider, like what is the purpose of this community? Who is it for? What Mighty Networks does is it just supports me as a creator and a community leader so that I can spend more time thinking about the conversations and the connections that we're making with other dads in the community. Now, if you're hearing this and you're like, wow, I'm, I'm a dad, I work like digitally remotely, then Digital Dads is probably going to be a great space for you to come and hang out and have a community and have a group of dads who are talking about fatherhood, obviously, but also like fitness and work and thinking about big decisions like, should I go out on my own? Should I take this job? Should I move? What am I doing to intentionally lead my kids and my wife and create a vision for my family? These are all conversations that we're having. So if you are a creator or you are a community leader and you're looking for a great place to gather your people together, I encourage you to check out Mighty Networks because they will do the most for making your community the best. It took me a while to understand that the value of my actions and my decisions that was based on self-direction and self-reliance was more important than the marginal improvement of expert reliance. Zonka Ahrens talked about this in his book, How to Take Smart Notes, which is not necessarily about making decisions, but This is how I interpret it and applied it. And he uses it in this, like, great metaphor about riding a bike. And he says that to become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all of the necessary mistakes, frustrations, and failures that come with them. Because like bicycling, it can only be learned by doing it. So you can get all the coaching, all the therapy, all the advice in the world. But until you start making intentional self-directed decisions supported by, you know, all that advice, great, but it has to be something that you're like, this is what makes sense for me. This is what I'm going to do. I hope this quick little video resonated with you. And if it did, and you're someone who has spent too much time trying to get the right advice so that you could feel like you were making the right decision, let me know in the comments because I'd love to encourage you. And just give you a clap and say like, hey, make your own decisions. Learn from the frustrations, the failures. Celebrate the successes because they will be self-directed, and that is the direction that you want your life to go in.
