Have you noticed that often we wait to feel ready before doing something that might actually help us grow?

Before we take on a new role, make an important decision, start something we have been thinking about for a long time, or simply do something that scares us a little, we tell ourselves that we should probably wait until we feel more prepared. Maybe we need a little more experience, a little more confidence, a clearer plan, or perhaps just a better sense that everything will work out. We’re not ready, yet!

The interesting thing is that when we look back at some of the moments that have changed us most, we don’t always remember feeling particularly ready for them. If anything, we remember feeling quite the opposite. There was usually some uncertainty involved, and quite often a voice in the background asking whether we really knew what we were doing.

And maybe that is the point.

We tend to imagine growth as something that happens before we take the next step. We think we need to become more confident, more capable or more resilient first, and then we will be ready to do the thing. But perhaps the order is usually reversed. Perhaps we become more confident because we do the thing, and we become more capable because we put ourselves in a situation that asks us to develop capabilities we didn’t have before.

There are simply some things we cannot learn in advance.

We can read about leadership, listen to podcasts about difficult conversations and prepare ourselves for what it might mean to take on more responsibility. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and actually having to live it. At some point, we have to make the decision, have the conversation, take the responsibility and find out what happens when we are the person who has to navigate the situation.

This is one of the ideas that are really interesting in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. He describes what he calls “Resistance” — the internal force that seems to appear whenever we are about to do something meaningful or important to us.

What is particularly interesting is that Resistance doesn’t always sound like fear. Sometimes it sounds very reasonable.

Maybe we should wait until we know more.

Maybe we need a better plan.

Maybe we should do this when things are a little less complicated.

Maybe we’re not quite ready yet.

And that’s what makes it so easy to listen to. We don’t always recognize these thoughts as a way of holding ourselves back. They can sound responsible, thoughtful and even wise.

The difficulty is knowing when preparation is genuinely helping us and when it has simply become a more comfortable form of postponing.

Because there is another kind of learning that only happens once we are actually in the situation. We don’t really know how we will respond to uncertainty until we have to make a decision without knowing the outcome. We don’t fully understand our capacity to have a difficult conversation until we are sitting across from someone and realize that avoiding it is no longer an option. And we don’t necessarily discover that we are capable of handling more responsibility until someone gives us more responsibility and we have to figure it out.

This is perhaps why growth can feel uncomfortable while it is happening.

We often expect growth to feel like confidence. Instead, it can feel like being slightly out of our depth. It can mean asking more questions than usual, making mistakes that we would rather not make, or going home after a conversation and wondering whether we handled it well. It can mean looking around and imagining that everyone else somehow knows what they are doing while we are still trying to work it out.

And yet, this is often where something is changing. And sometimes discomfort is simply what unfamiliarity feels like.

We see this particularly in the context of work. A new role can feel uncomfortable not because we are incapable of doing it, but because we haven’t done it before. The first time we manage a team, make a difficult decision or have to give someone feedback, there is no reason it should feel natural. We are learning a new way of being at work, not simply applying something we already know.

The same is true when we change direction in our careers, start something of our own, move into a new environment or take on a challenge that stretches us personally. We often look at the person we would need to become in order to do those things and conclude that we aren’t that person yet.

Maybe we’re not.

Maybe we become that person by doing them.

So perhaps the question isn’t always whether we feel ready.

Perhaps a more useful question is whether we are willing to begin before we do.