Coaching practices for I Work on My Character All in My Own Head by My Own Standards and it Stays Abstract and Unproven I Want a Real Craft or Commitment with Standards I Didn't Invent That Pushes Back Against My Shortcuts and Shows Me Honestly Where My Character Actually is
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I Work on My Character All in My Own Head by My Own Standards and it Stays Abstract and Unproven I Want a Real Craft or Commitment with Standards I Didn't Invent That Pushes Back Against My Shortcuts and Shows Me Honestly Where My Character Actually is, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I work on my character all in my own head, by my own standards, and it stays abstract and unproven
- I keep planning this thing in my head where it all seems to work perfectly, but the second I try to actually make it I realize I had no idea what I really wanted
- I keep waffling and breaking my own little promises to myself, so there’s no track record to point to
- When demands pull me in different directions I just bend toward whichever voice is loudest, because I’ve never actually pinned down my own criteria
- I’ve been turning this thing over in my head for weeks, planning and re-planning, and I’ve made nothing
Practices that may help
- Embed your virtues in a practice community
The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Prototype to think, not to finish
Build or sketch something rough specifically to learn what you actually want.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Use decisive action to build, not just express, self-concept clarity
Make and keep commitments deliberately — each kept commitment is data that builds a clearer self-knowledge over time.
Self-Concept Clarity, Made Practical - Write your own internal standard
Articulate the values and criteria you’ll use to judge your own choices, independent of approval.
Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind - Bias toward action over deliberation
Ship a rough version fast to learn what the problem actually is rather than theorizing indefinitely.
Creative Confidence, Made Practical - First-draft permission: produce something deliberately bad on purpose
Commit to writing, sketching, or making the worst version you can imagine — terrible on purpose removes the evaluative stake.
The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice - Experiment without attachment to outcome
Make many small experiments and treat each result as information — not as success or failure.
The Creative Act: Rick Rubin’s Approach to Making - Prototype — make it cheap and real
Build the roughest possible version that lets you learn something specific.
Design Thinking, Step by Step - Choose and study role models deliberately
Select a specific person whose character in a specific domain you want to internalize, and study how they act — not just what they say.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Question your own assumptions with Socratic rigor
Take a belief you hold confidently and submit it to the Socratic question: "What do you actually mean by that?"
The Examined Life
Related concerns
- When Deliberate Constraints Material Constraint
Remove access to all but two or three resources and let the constraint force inventive use of what remains.
Limit the materials or tools available
- Design Thinking Step By Step When Overwhelmed
Design thinking is a five-stage problem-solving framework — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school. It is a process model, not a tested intervention: its value comes from forcing you to understand the user before you commit to a solution, and to learn cheaply through prototypes instead of expensive bets.
- Evaluation Apprehension Creative Block
Ship a rough version fast to learn what the problem actually is rather than theorizing indefinitely.
Bias toward action over deliberation
- Fear Of Failure Creative Work
Build a personal rule: "I got data" replaces "I failed" after every attempt that didn’t land.
Reframe failure as information, not verdict
- How To Build On Ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Combine and build on others’ ideas
- How To Overcome Creative Perfectionism
Commit to writing, sketching, or making the worst version you can imagine — terrible on purpose removes the evaluative stake.
First-draft permission: produce something deliberately bad on purpose
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