Like a Match to our Fears

I spent some time over the holidays cleaning up several things on my blog. It has a spruced-up look and URL, it’s easier to subscribe, and I migrated subscribers to Feedblitz.

I mostly did this so it would be easier for you to share posts and for new readers to follow the blog (follow here).

One of the additional benefits is much better statistics: open rates, bounce rates, new subscribers, unsubscribes. Though “benefits” may not be the right word.

Ever since migrating, I have been getting a steady drip of emails letting me know about people unsubscribing from my blog.

At least that’s how it feels.

The truth is, I migrated a few thousand people and fewer than 20 have unsubscribed. But, like rubbernecking, I can’t seem to look away. The unsubscribes cry out, “Look at me! Think about what I mean! Contemplate why this person no longer wants to read!”

It’s hard to remember that Laura wrote me a nice note. So did Amy and Jamie. Arnie and Cornelius left comments on a recent post. And, and, and… If you listened to the conversation in my head, you’d think that all that good stuff never happened.

It’s a rule of thumb for the workplace and the classroom that people should hear four instances of positive reinforcement for every instance of corrective or negative feedback (though for marriages the ratio seems to be 5 to 1).

The question is, why? Why does the good stuff fade into the background and the negatives stand out in such stark relief?

The answer begins with noticing that it doesn’t happen everywhere: for things that we don’t care much about (“you’re terrible at ice skating!”), and for things that we’re deeply confident about, we’re mostly immune to this nonsense.

But in that wide area in the middle—the things that we care about, but where we’re not fully confident—we’re wide open to fear amplification.

Unfortunately, this “middle area” is really important. It encompasses all creative endeavors, since we are never fully confident our art. And it thrives in any area where we’re trying to grow, because, by definition, these are the areas in which we are both less skilled and less confident.

The fear waits like dry kindling ready to be set ablaze.

This kindling allows me to construct an amazing, elaborate tower of meaning around something as simple as one person in one place unsubscribing. It is the same thing that takes us, when we make a suggestion in a meeting that’s shot down, from the words we hear to, “he thinks I do terrible work, always. So he must think I’m terrible, always.”

As we interact with those around us, our job is to be especially deliberate about how we interact with colleagues–especially when we talk about their art and support their growth edges. Unless we work in organizations with cultures of consistently direct, tough feedback that people are accustomed to, we will stamp out personal growth if we trample, Godzilla-like, over areas where colleagues already are holding armfuls of doubt and fear.

And, for ourselves, we want to keep asking:

How much kindling are we carrying around? And is it really helping us?

Do we want to be the kinds of people who are ready to be set aflame, our fears blazing around us?

Do those flames make us more more connected? More powerful? More brave?

Do they make us more effective? More willing and able to do what needs to be done?

People will always carry matches, often unintentionally. Part of our job is to learn to douse all the fuel around ourselves so we’re not so easily taken off our game.

Oh, and I also changed my settings so I only get that unsubscribe email once a week.

 

Clues

Always be sniffing for clues that you are doing real and important work.

A nice cocktail to look out for is the mixture of fear that “this might be a total waste of time” mingling with moments (minutes, maybe hours) flying by because you are totally engrossed in something.

This fear you’re feeling comes because there aren’t clear external markers for what you’re working on, or because some people you trust are telling you that this won’t work, or because you can sense that you’re further out on a limb than you ever have been before.

When this sort of nagging doubt comes together with a project that completely engrosses you, one that sometimes grabs you and won’t let go because you’re so in sync with the work…that’s a great time to keep going for it.

That kind of synchronicity doesn’t come along often, and the fear and doubt you’re feeling is the worry that you might do something big and important.

You might. Which means that when you pull it off, you won’t be able to walk away from it.

That’s scary too. But it’s just this kind of work that we need from you.

The Kick

I’ve started swimming again.

To be more accurate, I started a year ago, dipping into the pool because the tendinitis in my right arm was so bad that it hurt to hold a coffee cup, let alone a racquet.

I’d avoided swimming for decades. As a child, for reasons I can’t explain, swimming terrified me. I was the kid who cried before every swimming lesson, tears streaming down my face while I stood waiting to be picked up each summer Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.

No surprise, then, that 30 years later, despite being physically active, 25 meters of freestyle left me clutching the side of the pool, panting for breath. Something about having my head in the water and needing to breathe to one side brought me back to Beginner Swimming lessons and the dreaded 25 meters of freestyle I had to swim to pass the test.

Nothing like an injury to get me to face my fears. Swimming was the only activity that eased the shooting pain in my injured right arm, relaxing the muscles and stretching out the tendons. That was motivation enough.

Over the course of last summer, I willed myself into the water, swimming 50 meters, then 100, then further. While I did eventually push through to being able to swim a few hundred yards, that old underlying panic still lurked. It was a feeling that at any moment I could devolve into a terrified kid gasping for breath.

(By way of contrast, my wife loves the water. She would describe her Zen-like experience swimming laps, and I’d listen, perplexed. To me, “ease” and swimming mixed like oil and water.)

At the start of this summer, I realized that, despite the progress I made last year, much of my effort and willpower had been taking me in the wrong direction: if I’m trying to work through a fear, then more effort and strain aren’t the right tools to use. This summer, I’ve been trying to figure out where that old panic comes from, and how it’s affecting what I do in the water.

What I’ve recently discovered is that my fear of not being able to breathe is manifesting in every stroke I take. Each stroke, I do a frantic flutter kick and I tense up my whole body in a misguided attempt to lift my full head (and half my torso, it seems) out of the water. That kick, that tensing up, it’s that 30-year-old terror resurfacing to sabotage my stroke and leave me exhausted.

I find it so tempting to muscle my way through these sorts of situations – not just in the water. Wouldn’t it be nice if fear were something we could overpower and wrestle to the ground?

I can’t, directly, beat back the fear, but I can change what I do in the water. I can focus on the behavior that the fear has created – in this case, the kick. So, as I swim laps, I focus on kicking less, on tensing up less, on straining less, and as I change what I’m doing with my body, over time, a bit of ease begins to seep in.

We discover this same pattern so often if we’re willing to look for it. We waste energy on things that feed on the energy we give them: the energy we put into stalling before sitting down to work; the energy we put into maintaining an image of strength and confidence for those around us; the energy we put into protecting someone who can stand on their own two feet; the energy we put into the decades-old stories someone put into our heads that we’ve never let go.

Most of the time, this energy comes from a place of fear or self-preservation. These fears lace themselves through our days and through our relationships. If left unexamined and unaddressed, they exhaust us, draining our mental and physical faculties and insulating us from what our experience could be.

We don’t overcome fear with more effort or by straining more.

We overcome fear by looking back to the source, seeing it clearly and, from a place of calm and clarity, discovering that we can behave differently and that, when we do, those old fears no longer have the power to hold us.

Terrified of success

It’s worth reflecting why we systematically under-prepare for things: big speeches, job interviews, presentations to the Board of Directors, asking for a raise.

We’ve heard all the talk about not losing spontaneity, about being in the moment.  Phooey.  All the best jazz musicians – professional improvisers – practice like crazy.

If there is foundational work that you (systematically) don’t do when the stakes are high, that is fear speaking.  Fear of spending time today looking the thing that scares you right in the eye.  Fear of putting in the time now, because when we put in that time we’re making an emotional commitment to a successful outcome.  Fear that if we try our hardest and then fail, we have no excuse – whereas if we wing it, we always have an out.

It’s surprising, ironic and a little sad: we under-invest in our own success not because we’re afraid of failing, but because we’re terrified that we might succeed.

*                                 *                                 *                                 *                                *

POSTSCRIPT to yesterday’s post: I was half right (or, if you prefer, half wrong), as Dean Karlan posted the results of his experiment on the Freakanomics blog.  The results are that prior donors who’d given less than $100 to Freedom from Hunger gave 0.9 percentage points LESS when presented with more facts/data; those who’d given  $100 or more gave 3.54 percentage points more.  So more facts made some donors give more, and some give less.  Dean shares an interesting observation in the post: “Freedom from Hunger is known amongst its supporters and those in the microfinance world as being more focused on using evidence and research to guide their programs.”  So these donors might be some of the most likely to be interested in evidence, and it still was a coin flip on whether more data resulted in more or fewer donations.

A better list

Lists are great – a systematized, orderly way to keep yourself on task and keep track of tasks.

Except of course that lists are usually an excuse – an excuse to do everything but the real work we have to do.

Some lists, full of seemingly important stuff, actually just say:

  1. Stall
  2. Stall
  3. Procrastinate
  4. Put stuff off
  5. Stall some more
  6. Look busy
  7. Have a meeting that looks busy
  8. Etc.

(By the way, your inbox is just a fancy list.  And don’t get me started on your Facebook / Twitter feed).

So how about this: keep the list, work the list, but act based on the knowledge that you’ll never get to the end of the list.  Knowing that, why not commit, once a day, to add one thing to the list (just one!!) that’s hard or scary, and commit to getting that thing done today.

Hard and scary is, it turns out, a pretty great proxy for “worthwhile.”

One item, once a day, every day, that terrifies you.

What should I do, boss?

A typical email:

Dear Boss,

Here are all the things going on with this project.   And also this.  Plus there’s this other thing we need to keep in mind.  This too, which is really important.  And I’m worried about this.

What should we do?

Employee

When you’re about to ask your boss to make a call on something, it’s worth stopping for a moment and asking what you’re doing and why.  You have the most information, usually, so the questions you might ask yourself are:

1.       Am I actually worse at making decisions than my boss?

2.       Do I not have the authority to make decisions?

3.       Or is neither of the above true and am I just avoiding responsibility for making a call?

The kicker is, the more you go ahead and decide stuff for yourself, the better you get at making decisions and the more authority you get (if this doesn’t happen, go work for someone else.)

Yes, sometimes you don’t know and/or you really need a thought partner, but I’d guess that happens 1 out of 5 times, maybe 1 out of 10 times, not most of the time.

The best birthday card ever?

A few years ago a good friend of mine started a greeting card business with all sorts of quirky cards for very specific events – buying a new Xbox; embarrassing faux-pas at the office holiday party; most sleepless nights in a row with a new baby….  When he took the cards to buyers, they all told him that the cards were great, but what they needed to see were more birthday cards, anniversary cards, and Valentine ’s Day cards.

The question he asked and we all need to ask today is: do I want to be in the business of trying to create the best birthday card ever?  Do I want to toil away and hope beyond hope that I’ll rise to the top – using the same tools and tactics as everyone else, but doing it just a little bit better?

You know:

Sure everyone does email campaigns, but ours is going to stand out a bit more because we’re going to tweak the headlines and up our open rates…

Sure everyone creates annual reports, but ours will be snappier, crisper, more memorable…

Sure everyone writes a quarterly email that no one reads, but this is what everyone expects, so we have to do it too…

Really?  You actually don’t need to do those things that everyone else does, and you certainly, certainly don’t need to do them in the WAY everyone does them (please!).

You don’t need to spend your organizational energy on things that “people expect.” Who are these “people” anyway?  What exactly do they expect?  Why?

Maybe these expectations are out there, and maybe they’re right, but I’d pressure test that a lot before spending organizational energy on creating another me-too thing that’s fighting for its life to be just-a-bit-above-average.

The chance that you write the world’s best, most memorable birthday card are pretty slim.  But creating the funniest “office party holiday gift card” ever – and getting that card in front of the people who buy and sell holiday gifts…well that sounds a lot more possible and a lot more fun.

WWYD?

It’s so, so easy to look all around for advice – to ask people who have done this before, who have more experience, who appear more qualified.

And you should get this advice. You should research.  You should dive deep into all of the tacks you can take.

But don’t forget to ask – and give credence to – the most important person of all: you.  YOU are the person gathering the information, you are the person on the front lines, you  are the one seeing the whole picture, you are the one whose opinion matters the most.

There’s a fine line between asking what others think and being too concerned about making them happy – to your/your work’s determent. Remember, getting where you need to get isn’t the same thing as making your superiors/peers happy every step of the way.

So, WWYD – What would YOU do?

add to del.icio.us : Add to Blinkslist : add to furl : Digg it : add to ma.gnolia : Stumble It! : add to simpy : seed the vine : : : TailRank : post to facebook

Too busy to do the scary stuff

We have to give ourselves credit – we don’t hide from the hard, scary things in obvious ways.  We get creative, and do things that look similar enough to important stuff that we can fool ourselves.  For example:

  • Yesterday I needed to call someone to have a “fish or cut bait” (that is, are you in or are you out?) conversation.  I calendared it and everything (for me, not for him).  But the calendar reminder came and went, and I kept on doing the “important work” I’d been doing.  Tick, tick, tick….it took a while for me to stand up, walk away from my computer and make the call.  I was probably busier and more productive in those minutes when I was putting off the call than I’d been all day long!
  • The other day I was talking to the founder of a smart new nonprofit.  He’s trying to get 150 institutions of higher learning to make a substantial change in their curriculum.  Right now, for various reasons, he’s focused on getting 1 million signatures to an online petition as ammunition for those meetings (so far he has 8,000 signatures).  Sure, the signatures will help, but why not call the 150 schools right now and talk to them?  Why not commit to calling the first 10 this week?  The strategies can (and will) be complementary, but it also will be easy for him to spend so much time focusing on the 1 million that the 150 (which is the real, harder goal) fades to black.

These are just two of many examples.  We see this every day – we build our websites before we have any customers and hire staff before we have any clients – not because we don’t know what the real work is but precisely because the real work is so much harder, and being busy with stuff that looks a lot like the real work is a wonderful way to hide.

add to del.icio.us : Add to Blinkslist : add to furl : Digg it : add to ma.gnolia : Stumble It! : add to simpy : seed the vine : : : TailRank : post to facebook

Fear.less this month

Ishita and Clay’s second edition of Fear.Less came out yesterday.  Inspiration, love, passion, beauty, delivered to you by email for free, once a month, no strings attached.

Read it because you want to be inspired.

Read it because you know, in your heart, that it’s time to lead.

Read it because you know that the voice inside your head, the one that tells you you can’t, is just plain wrong.

Read it because this is what magazines will look like in 10 years (or maybe 5, or maybe 2).

Read it because it helps to be reminded, by conductor Ben Zander, not to look for courage, but to look for love.

Read it because Suzanne Matthiessen is right, we do have a huge amount of control over what we feel.

Read it because it’s motivating to watch Chris Guillebeau live his dream of a different life in which he travels the world and tells stories.

Read it because author Julia Cameron, who has written more than 21 books, speaks from a place of authenticity when she says that she’s come to see fear as a companion.

Read it to because documentary photographer Platon gets right to the heart of the role his own authenticity plays in taking portraits.

Read it because Immaculee Ilibagiza, who hid for 91 days in a bathroom during the Rwandan genocide, has something to teach all of us about fear, faith, and forgiveness.

add to del.icio.us : Add to Blinkslist : add to furl : Digg it : add to ma.gnolia : Stumble It! : add to simpy : seed the vine : : : TailRank : post to facebook