‘Just do it’ doesn’t work for everything

On action, confidence, and what the ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ advice leaves out

I came across a clip of British comedian Russell Kane on a podcast recently, talking about his habit of solo city breaks – just him, a new place, and his own company. Someone had apparently said to him: ‘Oh, I wish I could have the confidence to do that.’ He pushed back, and what he said has stayed with me: “You don’t have to have the confidence to do the venture. You do the venture that you don’t have the confidence to do and take the confidence from it afterwards”.

I don’t disagree. In general, I think it’s right. The action nearly always comes before the confidence, and you don’t wait for motivation either – the action brings it. I’ve had my own version of this with solo travel. Before some of those trips I was genuinely petrified, and getting on the train/coach/plane anyway has led to some of the best experiences of my life.

And yet…

Here I am, still not quite there with my portfolio. Still not approaching art directors, not fully putting my work out into the world. Some of that is genuine: I’m still honing things, and I’m not willing to put out work that isn’t ready. But some of it is something else. Because there are certain kinds of actions that require more than white knuckling it through. Some things touch on real wounds, real history – and they call for a different approach. One that starts with the nervous system, not the to-do list.

Solo travel, for me, doesn’t carry the weight of visibility. I’ve never been shamed for being independent – if anything, I was encouraged. But what I have been shamed for is being myself: for being the odd one out, for not being chosen, for being too much and somehow still not enough. And that is precisely the wound that gets activated when I think about putting my creative work into the world. If I tried to white-knuckle my way through sharing my portfolio, my protective parts would swoop in faster than the Marines in a war zone. They’re not being dramatic. They’re doing their job. They’ve been doing it for a very long time.

The advice to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. It works well when the fear is unfamiliarity – the discomfort of the new. But when the fear has roots, when it’s attached to something that genuinely happened and got wired into the body, ‘just do it’ tends to activate the very defences it’s trying to bypass.

I’ve written before about the animals of Lantern Wood and how they represent some of my internal parts – this is rooted in Internal Family Systems (IFS), which understands the psyche as a whole community of parts, each with its own role and history. The ones that show up when I think about visibility aren’t obstructive for the sake of it. They learned to be cautious. They aren’t going to stand down just because I’ve decided it’s time. Developing a creative career is asking more of me than I initially thought – and I mean that in the most honest way, not the self-pitying one.

So yes – the action does come before the confidence. That part is true. But sometimes the first action isn’t the visible one. Sometimes it’s the quiet internal work: the slow, unglamorous process of helping your protective parts feel safe enough to step aside, just a little, just for now. That’s not avoidance. That’s not ‘not being ready’. That’s doing the harder thing first.

I’d love to know: is there something you’ve tried to ‘just do’ that hasn’t quite worked – and do you have a sense of what might actually be getting in the way?