Allowing ideas to mature
My ideas get rejected a lot. Sometimes by others, sometimes I myself reject them because of them not hitting the spot at a point in time. I believe that the rejection is not of the idea per se, but generally of its maturity.
I think everyone has some unique perspective to offer on any given discussion at hand. But more often than not, because it didn’t align with the majority pre-conceived notions in the group, their ideas get rejected. Because it’s a bit hard to understand the relevance of an idea which is not mature enough to have the immediate impacts ready to be shown.
People have a high tendency to reject their own good ideas if it lacks the prospect of immediate validation. A series of self-rejection and rejection by others of our ideas sometimes spirals out to a self-invalidation cycle, where people start thinking - all the ideas I get, suck.
We need to be a bit more compassionate towards ourselves. Allowing these ideas to mature over a period of time often make them more robust and make their relevance apparent. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said - “To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that is genius.“
Keeping a journal of my ideas around a subject matter is something that I have started doing a while ago. It also allows me to compare one idea with other and probably see how mature they are and how relevant they are in the current context. I can keep coming back to these and build these up over a period of a few days, months and even years.
I believe that the more self-compassionate I am, the more I listen and value myself, the more I will value others and their ideas. If I am a bit ahead in the journey of valuing and consistently improving upon myself and my ideas, I might be able to identify and support someone’s possibly brilliant idea which is not accepted broadly yet. And instead of outrightly rejecting it, I might be able to help them in nurturing the idea further. Thus, for organisations I think, there is merit in building systems that protect and help mature these nascent ideas in their day-to-day affairs.