Out Loud
On the questions you ask in your own head, and why they’re rigged.
In this newsletter: the safe question I asked myself for months, what a great conversation on a boat changed, and a better one to ask yourself this week.
Johannesburg. Home.
Feet slowly healing. Sleep coming back. 5am. On the couch, Jackson next to me, coffee in hand, waiting for my first proper sunrise in two weeks. Up in Svalbard the sun never drops. You forget what the dark is for. Now I’m home, writing this, watching the day come up the normal way, with a list on my phone that didn’t exist a month ago.
I’m not going to tell you what’s on it yet. Not properly. There are a few years on there, 5 to be exact, a few places, and one line at the end of it that no South African has ever walked. That’s all you get for now. I’ll share more soon. Not yet, but soon.
Because the list isn’t the useful part of this email. How it stopped being a daydream is.
For months that plan lived only in my head. And in my head, I kept asking it the wrong question.
Can I really do this. Am I ready. Is it realistic.
Those feel like serious questions. They’re not. They’re safe ones. You ask them in private, your fear answers in private, and the answer is always the same. Not yet. Not quite. Maybe when things settle. You can run that loop for years and call it being sensible.
The questions you ask inside your own head are rigged. Fear has home advantage in there.
And it gets worse. Those questions never actually resolve. Nothing is waiting on the answer. No deadline, no one across the table, nothing that happens if you don’t decide. So they don’t get answered. They get asked again tomorrow, and the day after, until the asking starts to feel like progress. Years go by and nothing has actually moved.
And fear is a careful lawyer. It rarely says no outright. It says not yet. Not yet sounds reasonable. Not yet sounds responsible.
Not yet is just how a thing dies slowly enough that you never have to watch it happen.
Then Svalbard. Last evening on the boat, a great group, people I spent 10 days with, started asking me the things I’d only ever asked myself. Why do you do this. What are you chasing. What’s next.
And I said it out loud. The whole thing. To faces that could look straight back at me and go, really, all of that, you sure.
Nothing about the plan changed in that moment. What changed was who got to answer. It wasn’t just me and my fear in my own head anymore. It wasn't just me and my fear in my own head anymore. It was out in the open. Other people had heard it now. So had reality.
Saying it out loud doesn’t make it easier. It makes it real. Those are very different things, and it’s the second one you’re after.
Something happens the moment it leaves your mouth, and none of it goes back in.
You hear it. Actually hear it, in your own voice, out in the air, not the soft narrated version that runs behind your eyes. Sometimes it lands bigger than you feared. Sometimes, and this is the one that gets you, it comes out smaller, and you realise it was never the impossible thing your head kept selling you.
Someone else knows now. A person walking around who heard you say it. Quitting used to be free and silent. Now it has a witness.
And the clock starts. Until you say it, doing nothing costs you nothing. You can let it sit in your head for years and not pay a cent. The moment it’s out, standing still has a price. So does walking it back. That bill is usually what finally gets you moving.
Sometimes you say it out loud and it commits you. Sometimes you say it and you hear how hollow it actually is, and that lets you put it down and stop carrying it. Both of those are wins.
The only loss is the version where it stays locked in your head another ten years, undecided, taking up the room an actual life was supposed to go in.
This isn’t about ice.
You’ve got one too. The thing you keep in your head. I’d put money on you guarding it with the same safe questions I used. Is it realistic. Am I ready. Can I.
It might be the job you’ve outgrown, and the one you actually want, that you’ve never said to a single person.
The business you’ve talked yourself through a hundred times and told no one, because the moment you say it out loud someone might expect you to build it.
The apology you owe. The relationship you want to fix, or finally end. The studying you walked away from. The thing you’d do tomorrow if you believed you were allowed.
Whatever it is, it’s safe right now. Sealed up in your head where it gets to stay a beautiful maybe forever and never gets tested.
And you already know yours. You probably have a reason ready for why now isn’t the time to say it.
You’ll say it when it’s further along. When it’s more certain. When you’ve worked out the how. When nobody could laugh at it.
That’s fear again, dressed up as patience. Figure out the what. The how comes later. The only job right now is to say the thing.
Drag it out.
Stop asking yourself the rigged question. Ask a better one. Who could I say this to, out loud, who would actually hold me to it?
And pick that person carefully.
Don’t pick someone who’ll soothe you. The friend who says you’re brilliant and changes the subject is no use here. Comfort is half the reason this has stayed in your head so long.
Pick the one who’ll remember. Who’ll bring it up again in a month with a straight face. Who’ll be a little disappointed if the answer is nothing. You want a witness with a memory, not a cheerleader.
Then say it. Not for advice. Not for permission. Just to get it out of the one place it can never fail, into the open where it finally has to become something.
None of it is complicated. It's just frightening, which is why almost nobody does it.
I know, because just when I stepped off the Greenland ice cap, most of mine was still a maybe I was keeping quiet to protect. Saying it to that group of people on the boat, and saying this much of it to you now, is what finally makes the last of it real.
Your turn.
And that’s it for this week.
Home now. Back to coaching this week, and I’ve got a couple of slots open if you want in. Body still rebuilding. Head clearer than it’s been in months, probably because for the first time in a long while I know exactly where I’m going.
Soon I’ll walk you through the whole road. Not yet. But soon.
You can always reach me directly, email or WhatsApp or my website. If you have any questions to comments, I’d love to hear from you!
If any of this landed, share it with someone who might need it. Would really appreciate it.
Do good work.
G.