When in Doubt, Create
I’ve long said that running a business is a continuous traumatic event.The closest analogy I know is parenting. No matter the age of your kids, you never clock out. Your level of involvement and what you worry about just change. I am not being dramatic about using “traumatic”. I’m saying it as a clinical term. The nervous system registers the sustained uncertainty and unpredictability of making payroll, losing a client, market shifts, etc the same way it registers physical threats.
Self-employment is an equal opportunity tormenter. If, like me, you were raised in economic and emotional instability, your mind is constantly seeking safety and chattering about “what ifs”. If you come from stability, the same thing happens. And from talking with other self-employed people who come from more stable backgrounds, these feelings can be even more intense because there is a strong contrast with what the mind perceives as “comfortable’.
If you are a conscious entrepreneur, the pressure is compounded. We have been witness to anti-American, anti-freedom behaviors and the thought of not saying something about it is nauseating. This added to the pit-in-the-stomach feelings about being an entrepreneur. We know that using your voice always comes with a cost, so the temptation to compromise our values and our worth is constant. I have stood in that gap between integrity and compliance many times; the version of me trying to survive the quarter staring down the version of me trying to stay whole.
Which brings me to the main emotion that we entrepreneurs most struggle with: Doubt.
Like any strong emotion, doubt is not actually the problem. The actual problem is how we respond to it; what doubt makes us do. One of my therapists once told me that you cannot be anxious and curious at the same time. Those two states occupy the same parts of the brain, and only one can rule at a time. There is a similar stand-off between doubt and action. Doubt doesn’t respond to reassuring words or more information. The cure for doubt is action. As entrepreneurs, there are many actions we can take, but the one that produces the fastest results for dealing with doubt is creativity.
Creativity is proof of power; proof that the forces that created the universe still live in you. Creativity exposes doubt as a story your nervous system tells you when it has forgotten what you are capable of. It insists the situation is larger than your capacity to act inside it. Creating something debunks that story. When you create something that did not exist before, you demonstrate that you still govern your interior life. That is why doubt responds to creativity. Further it is why reassurance is borrowed power.
Creativity is your power. But only if you use it.
What Creativity Does for your Mind
The brain defaults to threat surveillance when anxiety has no focal point. That is biology, not a character flaw or a spiritual deficiency. The amygdala is doing exactly what it was designed to do: scanning for danger, flagging uncertainty, running the catastrophe reel on a continuous loop with no intermission scheduled. Left to its own devices, the brain is an anxious CFO who only wants to prove to you through bank account balances that doubt is the problem.
When you create something, the prefrontal cortex comes back online. Dopamine shifts from dread-anticipation to completion-anticipation. The Default Mode Network, which is where the rumination spiral lives and pays rent, goes quiet because you have given the mind a problem with a possible answer. Your CFO stops auditing your worst fears and starts freeing resources building something. That is a measurable neurological shift and it is available to you at any time, for free, which makes it considerably more accessible than most of what gets marketed as a mental health solution.
The Karpman Drama Triangle is my favorite framework for explaining this. The three positions (Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer) form a closed triangle.Conscious entrepreneurs spend a remarkable amount of time in that triangle, cycling between feeling crushed by a rigged system, wanting to burn the system to the ground, and exhausting themselves trying to rescue everyone else from the system before they have attended to themselves.
Thankfully, every position inside the triangle has a direct opposite. Persecutor’s opposite is Challenger. Rescuer’s opposite is Coach. Victim’s opposite is Creator. For our purposes, the one that matters most is Creator, because Creator is the only opposite position that requires you to make something. You cannot be passive and be a Creator. You cannot be reactive and be a Creator. Creation requires you to generate rather than react, and the triangle runs entirely on reaction.
The moment you start to create, the rest of the triangle begins to shift. This is not accidental. Creativity is one of the eight qualities of the True Self; what Richard Schwartz, after decades of mapping the interior life of human beings under pressure, identified as the core of who you actually are when fear, shame, and conditioning stop running the show. The other seven are calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, and connectedness. When creativity goes offline, the True Self goes partially offline with it. As such, creating something is the fastest way back to yourself.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
What Creativity Does for Your Soul
Creativity is the oldest spiritual act on record. It is older than doctrine. And it is certainly older than any institution that decided it had the authority to regulate access to the sacred and set the value of your worth. Before all of that organizational overhead existed, human beings were painting on cave walls and carving figures from bone, making things as a way of saying: “I exist, I was here. I created something that has never been made before.” Nobody issued a permit. Nobody ran a focus group or reviewed the budget. They just made something and left it on the wall.
That impulse to create still lives in every person, but for most, it got buried under productivity metrics, professional identities, and the grinding social pressure to be useful in legitimate, billable, and approved ways. Burial and extinction are different things, though, and when you return to creating, something returns with you that had gone dormant.
There is also a reason the act of making something feels genuinely subversive right now. Systems that rely on your compliance need you afraid, passive, and consuming. A person who creates is a person organizing their own interior life rather than renting it out to whoever has the loudest and most urgent claim on their attention. They are harder to recruit through fear and harder to manage through manufactured urgency. Creation is, at its most fundamental, a daily act of sovereignty; a declaration that your interior life is generative and answers to you.
My partner, Virginia Lacayo, Ph.D., describes “Creative Muscle” as one of the seven skills of what she refers to as an Indomable mindset. Indomable is a Spanish word that translates, roughly to “impossible to domesticate”. It names a state of consciousness that is, by design, resistant to the forces that would rather you stay quiet and compliant. Creative Muscle earned its place on that list because creation is among the most concrete daily expressions of defiance available to any human being.
Oppressed communities have always understood this. The quilts, the spirituals, the murals, the poems written in prison and sung in the fields; none of that was decoration. It was people refusing to be fully colonized, using the one act no external force can permanently confiscate. When you create something, you declare that your interior life is still yours. That is an act of justice directed first at yourself, and it radiates outward from there. Virginia built Indomable on this premise; that Creative Muscle is a survival skill, a political skill, and a spiritual skill, and that a leader who stops creating has handed something over that was never meant to be surrendered. She figured out something that theologians have been awkwardly writing around for centuries: creativity is how the soul confirms it is still present and still free.
“Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.”
- Julia Cameron
What Creativity Does to the Systems You Occupy
The market is fickle and unpredictable. It rewards things that have nothing to do with quality and ignores things that deserve celebration, often in the same week, with no discernible logic and absolutely zero shame about it. Chasing the market as a primary source of trying to allay doubt is a waste of fucking time. Rick Rubin settled this question in The Creative Act with one sentence: “Do what you can with what you have. Nothing more is needed.” The market decides what it does with what you make. You decide what you make. That division of labor is the whole answer. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Creation is a leading one.
In any system, the power to create is the one reliable counter to the anxiety of everything beyond your control, because it is the one domain where you remain sovereign regardless of external conditions. Your job is to keep making things and allow the market to sort itself out, which it will do with or without your level of doubt.
Creativity deployed only as a coping mechanism or hobby operates at a fraction of its actual capacity. Positioned as a governing principle of how you organize time and attention, it restructures your entire reality. This means creating before consuming. It means starting with something generative before obligatory tasks. It means reaching for a notebook at 3am rather than the Instagram feed that will confirm your worst suspicions and sell you something on the way out. It means building creative output into the business model as a non-negotiable rather than treating it as the first indulgence to cut when revenue tightens.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
― Martha Graham
Changing the Definition of “Making it”
“Making it” in the traditional sense means revenue, recognition, and arrival at some level of success. While we certainly want to generate ethical wealth, the real definition of making it is simpler and more subversive: make something today, from what you have, for the reasons you have.
Most conscious entrepreneurs are sitting on far more creative capacity than they are currently deploying. The discipline of making something (an essay, a framework, a product, a conversation, a visual, a practice, the list is endless) is also the discipline of staying in contact with why you became an entrepreneur in the first place.
Creation is how conscious people stay sane inside insane systems, how the soul stays warm when the world runs cold, and how you remind yourself — and everyone watching you — that the forces demanding your compliance have not won and will not win as long as you keep making things. Build the creative muscle that Indomable demands and the world desperately needs. That is the work and that is the whole point.
EXACTLY what I needed to read today. Thank you 🙏❤️
Love this line, “Creation is how conscious people stay sane inside insane systems, “
Thank you for such an insightful piece. Very resonant.