MMS_JuneE2 - Stop Waiting to be ready_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] So here's the question this episode is built around. What if being ready was never a requirement? What if it's not even a real thing, that being ready thing?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine. I want you to take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. We are in week two of my July series titled Stripped Down and Still Powerful. All month long, we're sitting with one question: Who am I without all the labels?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Last week, we looked at the labels that other people handed us, the plans built for us by other people who usually love us long before we get to have a say. And this week, we are flipping the directions entirely, because this week isn't about the voices outside of us, it's about the [00:01:00] one inside. Sometimes the truest version of who we are doesn't wait to be ready, it just speaks.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And what we do next with that, that inner knowing, whether we listen to it or whether we ask it to wait, can shape everything. You see, most of us were raised to trust a checklist. Get the credentials, check. Do research first, check. Weigh out all the options, check. Be sure, really sure, before you make a move.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We do logic first, feelings second, and gut feelings somewhere way down the list, right below maybe asking a stranger and flipping a coin. And so when our inner knowing shows up, it's a pull towards something, a quiet certainty that has no paperwork to back it up. Most of us choose to do the responsible thing.[00:02:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We table it. We tell it, "Not yet. I'm not ready." Maybe there's a decision that's half made in the back of your mind for months. Maybe you've had something in the back of your mind for years. Maybe there's something, a little something. Maybe it's a change, a conversation that needs to be had, a direction you've been edging towards that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, and you keep turning around and say, "I'm gonna wait on that."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So here's the question this episode is built around. What if being ready was never a requirement? What if it's not even a real thing, that being ready thing? Because I wanna tell you about the least ready moment in my entire life and how it was the best decision I ever made. These kinds of things happen all the time, I'm telling you.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So let me tell you about the least ready moment [00:03:00] in my entire life, which funny enough, turned out to be the best decision I ever made. They both happened at the same time, and on the same sidewalk, actually. So let me tell you about the least ready moment of my life, which funny enough, turned out that the least ready moment I had was the best decision I ever made They did happen at the same time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: On the same sidewalk, actually. It was my senior year at Earlham College. It's a small liberal arts school in Richmond, Indiana. That's where I landed after Ohio State. I was a socio-anthropology major, and I loved it. I had a path. I had a thesis coming. I had a plan that finally felt like mine. And then one November day, crisp and clear and sunny, the kind of day where the air feels like it's just paying attention to everything, it's listening.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was walking across that oval, not thinking about anything [00:04:00] important, just walking, minding my own business, and a voice inside of me, plain as anything. I wasn't listening for anything. I wasn't intentionally creating anything. I wasn't even thinking about anything. And that voice said something Clear as a bell.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You need to go to medical school. And I stopped completely, mid-stride, in the middle of that oval, and I swear to you, I looked up at the sky and said out loud to no one, "What the hell?" I kid you not. Now, this wasn't the first time my inner voice had spoken so clearly that came out of nowhere that it showed up in my life, but that's a story for another day.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What I knew in that moment was that this voice wasn't asking. It wasn't suggesting. It had a tone of something that had already been decided somewhere deeper inside my thoughts or in the universe, and it was just now getting around to [00:05:00] informing me, and I mean serious. It was, like, not negotiable. So I did the only reasonable thing that a socio-anthropology senior could do.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I marched right to my academic advisor's office right then. Now, I adored this man, and in the interest of full honesty, I'm fairly certain that when I walked in, he was enjoying a little herbal relaxation, and if you know what I mean, remember, it was a different era back then. So I stood there and announced that I needed to go to medical school, and this man, glassy-eyed and completely unbothered, took a moment and took it in and said, "What the F?"
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But he used the real word. And then, God bless him, he said, "Well, let's figure this out." So within the hour, he had called up a pre-med advisor and sent me across campus to meet them. That same day, no committee, no waiting period, just two advisors [00:06:00] and a young lady who'd been ambushed by her own gut on the sidewalk.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I mean, I did a pivot and switch right there. So here's the part that still amazes me. When we actually sat down and looked at my coursework, about 80% of all of my pre-med requirements were already done. I hadn't planned that. I want to be really clear. There was no secret master plan. I had just been taking advanced sciences all along because I liked them.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: My high school had prepared me so well that I kept gravitating towards them semester after semester for no practical reason at all. Or so I thought. Looking back now, I'm not so sure that was an accident. I think that some part of me had been quietly packing for this trip years before. All I needed, however, was just one or two more semesters to finish the gap for my pre-med.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So I spent that winter filling in the last courses and working on a thesis that merged my two worlds, [00:07:00] the transformation of medicine from ancient Greek times to modern American health system. And I'll be honest with you, the thesis was a slog. It was harsh. That was before the internet, when research meant physically hunting down sources and hauling books across the oval from that library.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: American healthcare turned out to be its own foreign language to me. But the whole time, even in that slog, something inside me felt congruent, like I was finally rowing my life in the direction the river was actually going. So I loaded up on chemistry and physics while applying to medical school, and I actually enjoyed the focus, with one exception, statistics, or as I called it back then, sadistics.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: To this day, it drives me insane. When I take a test, no matter what the test is, if there's a statistics question that shows up in [00:08:00] front of me, I don't even try to figure out anymore. I just pick C and I go on, because I'm not gonna waste my time on it, because I hated statistics. I think that was some PTSD.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Anyway, but here's the moment where it all landed. When I sat down to write my medical school entrance essay, I had to tell my story, all of it, the struggles, the failures at Ohio State, the losses, the loss of gymnastics and the identity. And something happened to me as I wrote it all. I watched all of those broken pieces rearrange themselves into something I had never seen before.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A process, a preparation. Every painful thing that I had survived had quietly been teaching me something about human frailty and about how to walk with people through their pain It was risky to put all that vulnerability on paper for strangers on an [00:09:00] admissions committee. Terrifying, actually. But writing that essay gave me the one thing that all the chemistry and physics studying couldn't.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It gave me the perspective that I could actually do this. The voice on the oval, that interjection that said, "You're going to medical school," it knew what it was talking about. The inner knowing, the universe, God, whoever you wanna call it, had been collecting evidence for years that this was my trajectory.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It was just waiting for me to stop walking long enough to hear the voice. Now, here's the thing. My version of this story happened on a college oval with a slightly stoned advisor and a stack of science credits that I didn't know I had been creating. But the pattern underneath it, the one that shows up everywhere, the knowing that arrives before permission.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's a career that keeps whispering. [00:10:00] Maybe it's a conversation that needs to happen. Maybe it's a move or a change or a leap that keeps showing up in quiet moments. Might be the shower, on a drive, or at 2:00 in the morning, and we keep getting the same answer. We might respond to that whispering, that nudge, with, "No, not yet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm not ready." And I wanna be gentle with that answer because it sounds so responsible for us to put off that little nudge, that little knowing, that little quiet voice in our heads and our hearts. And putting it off might sound responsible, like I said, but it also might sound like it's wisdom. But here's what it is.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Waiting until we're ready, that's what careful, thoughtful people do, right? No, because here's what I've noticed. In my own life and the lives of so many people I've worked [00:11:00] with, that sta-statement, "I'm not ready," almost never means I don't have enough information. It almost always means I'm still scared I'm gonna say that one more time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: When we respond to those inner knowings and those nudges with, "I'm not ready," it's probably just because we're scared, and they're very different problems. Because if it's information we're missing, waiting works. We're gonna learn, we're gonna gather, we're gonna prepare. And when readiness actually arrives, we might move forward.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But if we're waiting for fear to leave, we're gonna be waiting a long time, because fear doesn't leave. Fear waits for us. Fear will happily sit in the passenger seat for 30 years, completely content as long as the car never leaves the driveway. Has there ever been something like that for you? [00:12:00] A knowing that shows up and maybe even nudges or taps you on the shoulder repetitively, but you keep asking it to wait in the car.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You keep saying, "Not yet. I'm not ready to go yet." Because here's what I didn't understand at the time, standing on that oval. The voice wasn't early for me. The voice was right on time. I was the one running late for the voice. I was the one who had kept delaying it, choosing different choices until I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And a lot of us do that. We hear the voice, we feel the nudge, and we keep pushing it away and saying, "I'm not ready." So here's a reframe I want to offer, and it took me years to see this one clearly. Readiness is not a feeling. We treat it like one. We wait for it like one. We talk about it like it's a sensation that is supposed to wash over us [00:13:00] one morning, like some green internal light that flips on and says, "Now, go do it now."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And so we check it over and over again. We check it. Am I ready? How about now? Now? We sit there and we wait for that feeling of being ready, but that feeling that we're waiting for, that settled, certain, no doubts left feeling isn't readiness. It's certainty, and certainty almost never shows up before we take a move.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It shows up after, and sometimes long after Because here's what I mean. When I walked into medical school, I did not feel ready, I guarantee you. And when I started residency, oh, let me tell you about my first day of residency. It was July 1st, and here's a fun fact for you. July 1st is the start date for every medical residency across the [00:14:00] entire United States, which means that every year on exactly the same day, hospitals all over the country are simultaneously flooded with the least experienced doctors that they will ever employ.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if you ever want to see thousands of highly educated people collectively not feeling ready, July 1st is your day. So there I am, day one, brand new, just graduated from medical school, and they hand me a beeper. And this, yes, was the era of beepers, which I clipped to my waistband, set to vibrate like every professional so it doesn't interfere with conversations.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Now, the chief resident is giving me a tour, and we're at the pharmacy, and she's talking with the pharmacist, and everything is calm, everything is fine. And that was the-- I'm laughing to this day on this. That was the exact moment that my [00:15:00] beeper decided to go off for the first time. Now, I want you to understand something.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I had never felt a vibrating beeper on my body before. So when it buzzed against my hip, I did not think, "Oh, my beeper's going off." I thought that something was happening to me, and I jumped, and I screamed out loud in the pharmacy in front of them on day one. Yep, the chief resident and the pharmacist laughed so hard that I'm fairly certain that one of them had to sit down, and the other one almost fell down.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I stood there in my brand-new little white coat, wanting the floor to open up and swallow me. I am telling you, that was my level of readiness on July 1st. A doctor, an actually graduated doctor, startled into screaming by her own pager. So here's the point. The feeling of being ready comes later. [00:16:00] It always comes later.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Mine got built brick by brick out of the doing, out of the thousands of shifts and thousands of pages that every stopping point no longer made me jump. Sureness follows movement. Okay? Sureness follows movement. Sureness follows experience. Certainty never comes, and it certainly doesn't lead us. Which means all those years we spend waiting to feel ready first, we've got the order backwards.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Now, I wanna be careful here because I'm not saying every impulse deserves the keys to your life. No. Every impulse isn't always right on target. There is a difference between a knowing and a whim, and that matters because a whim is loud and fast and impulsive and hungry. It shows up in a rush, usually right after something [00:17:00] painful, and it wants action now.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Quit today. Leave tonight. Send the messages before you think twice. And then given a little time, it evaporates. So a whim evaporates. A knowing is different. A knowing is quiet. It's patient. It doesn't demand. It returns. It survives scrutiny. You can argue with it, stall it, bury it under a busy season in your life, ignore it for a year.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But when things get quiet, it's still sitting there, calm, unbothered, like it has nowhere else to be. The voice on that oval for me wasn't a whim. It had been assembling itself for years through support groups, through a summer of strangers, selling vacuum cleaners, through science classes that I took for no reason because I liked it.[00:18:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just finally spoke up. So the reframe in this, the question was never, am I ready? The question is, what do I already know that I've been waiting for permission to admit? Those are different questions. Not am I ready, but what have I been waiting for and I'm ready to admit? Really only one of them has an answer.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So let me pause here for a minute because that voice on the oval does deserve a closer look. Because I know how it sounds, a voice out of nowhere on a sidewalk announcing medical school to a sociology major. Gosh, that might sound like magic, or a movie, or depending on your worldview, a good reason to schedule an evaluation at a psychiatrist's office.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But here's what I've come to understand about moments like that. [00:19:00] They only look like they came out of nowhere. You see, our brains are not cameras. They're not just recording the present moment as it happens. What our brain actually does all day, every day, underneath our awareness, is predict. I talk about this all the time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's constantly guessing what's going to come next based on every single thing it's ever seen. So our brain is processing everything we ever had before and is adding it to our database. What we've seen, what we've learned, what we've lived through, and every experience we've ever had gets filed away and quietly used to build forecasts for our own lives.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Scientists call this the predictive brain, and here's the part that matters for us. Most of that predicting happens below the surface, way below. Our conscious mind, the part doing the worrying and the list-making and the am I [00:20:00] ready yet, that part only sees a tiny sliver of what the brain is actually working on.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So sometimes, down in that deeper system, a conclusion gets finished before our thinking mind has ever opened up the file. You see, all the evidence has been weighed. Our brain has weighed everything. The patterns have been complete. It's been witnessing things, and the answers in our brain, in our subconscious, is already there.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And when that happens, it has to get delivered somehow. So for me, it g- got delivered on a November afternoon in the middle of the oval at school in a voice that felt like it came from somewhere else But look at what the voice had been working on. Years of being drawn to sciences for no particular reason, enough to quietly finish most of my pre-med requirements by [00:21:00] accident, a support group that I created where I discovered my voice to help other people ease their pain.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A summer of strangers' living rooms of selling Kirby vacuum cleaners so I could learn to read people and connect with them. Piece by piece by piece, my deeper mind had been assembling a case. The voice on the oval wasn't a lightning bolt. Felt like it to me. It was a verdict. The evidence had been coming for years, and I was just the last one to hear about it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that's why I'd like to invite us to do something altogether. I want us to look at the thing we call a gut feeling, an instinct, a knowing. It isn't the opposite of logic. It's logic that ran ahead of us. It's the deeper mind that's finishing our math for us. Does that make sense? I hope so, because [00:22:00] maybe the micro shift right here today is just this.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For you, I want you to think about this. The next time a quiet knowing keeps returning to you, not a whim, but the patient kind, the kind that survives scrutiny. Instead of asking, "Where did that come from?" We might ask, "Hmm, how long has that been waiting?" Because the hesitation, the doubting, the waiting to feel ready, that isn't who we are.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That is just a pattern the brain runs when it can't guarantee the outcome. And once we can see it for what that is, it starts to loosen. So here's where the mindset medicine piece of today's episode comes in. And as I promised, this goes deeper than trust your gut, because as advice goes, trust your gut is about as useful as be yourself.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Truly, [00:23:00] because it's a lovely idea, it's a lovely sentiment, but there's really no instructions on how to just be yourself. So here's what I want us to do. I want to look at the belief that so many of us keep waiting, and the belief is this: being sure is the same thing as being safe What do I mean by that?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Think about what we learned growing up. Most of us spent the first 20 years of our lives being graded. Every answer we ever gave was either right or wrong, and the wrong answers costed us points. Raising our hands when we're sure makes us feel good. Check your work. Don't guess. We were trained, literally trained, with report cards to believe that certainty comes first and action comes second, that being unsure means you're not prepared, that being unprepared means you fail.[00:24:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And then we graduate into actual life where almost nothing works that way. Nobody hands us a study guide for changing careers. There's no answer key for hard conversations. And life, it turns out, does not grade us on certainty. It grades us on just showing up But the old belief doesn't know that, so it keeps us at our desks studying for a test that was never scheduled, waiting to feel sure enough to take a leap into something that we really have a little inkling we should be doing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So here's what makes me laugh about my own story, and I mean genuinely laugh. My father spent 18 years of my life building a careful, certain, thoroughly researched plan for my life. Ohio State, the big name, the sure thing. It checked every box for him, and that plan collapsed inside of one year for him [00:25:00] and for me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Then one November afternoon at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I'm walking across an oval and a voice, one voice, interrupted my walk on the sidewalk. No research, no boxes, no plan whatsoever, and that rearranged my entire life in about ten seconds, and correctly I might add. Eighteen years of certainty didn't fit.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Ten seconds of knowing became my whole life. So the shift I want to offer isn't trust your gut. It's smaller than that, and it's quieter than that, and it lives in the internal dialogue we all get. It's moving from I need to be sure to I want to find out and I want to be curious and I want to try about that or try something like that.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Do you feel the difference in those sentences? One is I need to be sure. It locks the door and it waits. [00:26:00] I'm willing to find out opens it a crack. It doesn't demand a leap. It doesn't require fearlessness. It just changes our job description from judge, who has to rule everything in advance, to explorer, who only has to take the next honest step.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Being sure is a destination. Being willing is a direction, and a direction is all any of us actually needs to begin. So let's pause here for just a minute. Is there something you've already known for a while that you've been waiting to feel ready for? Not a whim, the other kind, the quiet kind, the one that keeps coming back when things get still.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just let it surface. No pressure to act today. Nothing naming, right? Just notice it. Just let it surface. No pressure to act on it today. I just want you to notice it. [00:27:00] Before we close, we've arrived at the Unicity Moment, and if you've never been to the show before, this is something I've recently begun including in every episode.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So let me tell you what it is. The Unicity Moment is a guided inner experience. It blends elements of clinical hypnotherapy, a nervous system reset, and what I like to call space making. It isn't therapy. It isn't quite meditation either. It's just a deliberate pause, a chance for everything we've talked about today to settle from your head down into the rest of your body.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And as always, if you're driving right now, please keep your eyes open and on the road, and don't operate machinery while you're doing this. Just let the words wash over you and come back to it later where you're in a situation where you can be still. For everyone else, find a comfortable position, and when you're ready, just gently let your eyes close.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And take one slow breath [00:28:00] in, and let it go. There's nowhere to be right now, nothing to figure out, just this breath. And the next one
Dr. Julia Bowlin: In and out And I want you to imagine standing on the edge of a still water. Maybe it's a lake early in the morning. Fog is slowly lifting up. Maybe a quiet pond tucked somewhere off a trail, and the air is calm. There's no wind, and the surface of the water is so still it holds a perfect reflection of the sky
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And notice how quiet it is here It's not an empty quiet, it's a full one an [00:29:00] all-encompassing, beautiful, peaceful kind of quiet that we can just rest in
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And just notice that in this space, the quiet's being held, and in this space, maybe there's something that's been waiting to be heard, a knowing, a pull. Something patient has come back to you again and again in still moments, and it always has been asking to be listened to, and maybe you've kinda said, "Mm, maybe not yet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just wait a little bit." There's no need to force anything, and if nothing comes, the stillness in itself is enough today. But if there is something there, let it rise gently. It is a small thing, not [00:30:00] a big thing, a simple thing. But if something's there, the way something floats to the surface of a water, of this calm water, don't push it, just allow it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You don't have to act on it. You don't have to solve it or schedule it or explain it to anyone. Right now, it's only an invitation, and it's to stop asking for it to wait Let it sit beside you safely and calmly without stress or overwhelm at this water's edge And look at it honestly Maybe for the first time
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some listeners find that what surfaces feels like relief. For some, it feels tender. For some, it's simply a [00:31:00] quiet recognition of, "Oh, there you are." These are the small things that have been waiting for you to pay attention to. So whatever rises or doesn't, it's exactly right for now
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Take one more breath in And let it go. And notice the water is still calm, the sky is still reflected, and nothing about acknowledging what we know has to be loud or fast or frightening. Knowing can be quiet, this quiet
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And whenever you're ready, let the water's edge just begin to fade a little bit and feel the weight of your body where you're sitting or lying down. Just notice where you are right now The [00:32:00] sounds around the room, the air around you, wiggling your fingers now, maybe rolling your shoulders a little bit and take in the sounds of everything around you And when it feels right, let your eyes open And welcome back.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This episode was never really about big decisions. It was about the knowing underneath all of them, and how long we're willing to make them wait. If something surfaced for you today, it's not a demand for action. This is just the beginning. And if waiting has been a part of your story, there's nothing wrong with you, or for that.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Your brain was doing its job. It just may be time to give it a new one, a new job. Now, next week, we take this one step further, because hearing our own voice is one thing. Actually using it is a whole different sport, [00:33:00] especially when people who got comfortable with us always being quiet and not speaking up.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Next week, we talk about love, real love, and what happens when giving everything to everyone starts to leave nothing for us. It's a tender one, and it's an honest one, and if you've ever been the person that everyone counts on, you're gonna wanna be here. Thank you for spending time with me, and until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional [00:34:00] life.
