No matter what you do or what you’re trying to achieve, you need to trust your process.

Trying to make an important decision and want to avoid making “the wrong one?” You need to trust your process.

Trying to figure out how you should go about completing a new project? You need to trust your process.

I was thinking about his during a baseball game the other day. There are a bunch of “best practices” in baseball, as there are in any sport. As there are in pretty much anything in life.

When this happens, you are supposed to do this.

When the pitcher is wild, you’re supposed to take a strike.

When you’re a runner on second base and a ground ball is hit to the shortstop, only take third if the ball is to your left. If it’s hit to your right, stay at second unless the ball gets past him.

When your project is over budget, you try to find efficiencies to make up for it. But just because you do what you’re supposed to do, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be successful.

Process does not guarantee results.

You can’t control the results as much as you’d want to.  All you can do is settle on the right process, trust it, and then follow it through.

Same thing applies for creative activities like writing. When you’re in the act of writing, it’s easy to feel like what you’re making sucks and that you should just stop and forget about it.

Most writers feel this way.

But they also know what their process is, and that usually means plowing ahead despite these feelings and delaying judgement on their work as much as they can. It means being OK with a shitty first draft.

My advice to anyone reading this in whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish? Learn from your mistakes. Learn from your successes. Pay attention to how you do things, why you do them, and what puts you in the best situation to succeed.

That is your process, and it’s vital to everything you do.

Perfect your process. Tweak it, test it, perfect it. And once you figure out a process that works for you, give yourself unto it. Trust it.

Enjoy it, your process is your friend.

Image by Sonny Abesamis