Tag: fear

Afraid of the Dark

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

As longtime readers might recall, I have a bit of a hot-and-cold relationship with swimming.

Swimming freestyle scared me as a kid. Nevertheless, swimming has always seemed like the kind of thing I could love, so I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last five years learning Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion approach to swimming. In addition to helping me swim better, it was also my introduction to kaizen, a learning philosophy that emphasizes specific, hyper-focused continuous improvement. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Over these last few years, I’ve made enough progress that I now appreciate swimming and from time to time I even have good swims. However, swimming remains low on my list of priorities, so my progress has been slow.

That said, I can now work my way through a mile in the pool reasonably well and with limited agita—even if being truly relaxed in the water eludes me most days.

Nevertheless, quarantine has been a chance to go deep in all sorts of physical activity, and recently I had the chance to spend a week by a big, beautiful lake in Maine. The only problem was that open water swimming still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Given this backdrop, and as a nod to safety, when I have the chance to swim in this massive lake, I decide the best approach is to swim laps to a buoy that is about 40 meters from the shore.

I dive in, imagining that soon I be cutting through this pristine lake gracefully.

Then I put my head in the water. It’s nearly pitch black. I cannot see the bottom and I have no idea where I am or how far I away I am from the buoy.

The old narrative in my head kicks in. “This is scary, and I can’t do this. How much longer until I get to the buoy? Should I pick up my head or swim some more? I can’t see, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know how much progress I’ve made or how far I still need to go!”

I am unmoored. The sensory experience nearly overtakes me.

And yet, if you pulled back the camera, what you see looks nothing like what’s going through my head. I am swimming, just as I always do. I’m making progress to and from the buoy. I’m not going particularly straight, but it’s not too bad. Sometimes a wake bounces me, splashing some water in my mouth. Mostly I’m swimming the way I always do.

So which view is the right one, the real one? Is it the one in my head, or the one you’d see from the shore?

What saves me from throwing in the towel is that I remembered the order of operations inside my head: first I have feelings and emotions, then I make sense of them with the story I tell.

The feelings I’m experiencing: disorientation due to darkness, no sense of where I am, of whether I am stuck or making progress.

The emotions I feel: fear and panic.

The story I tell myself: this will never work, I am failing, I should give up.

This pandemic is a bit like those black waters. Stuck at home, we can lose our sense of place, of progress. It’s harder to tell where we are and where we are going. The clarity of what it feels like to go from point A to B and back again has been yanked away from us.

We feel unmoored.

This feeling results in emotions.

These emotions result in a story about what we can and cannot do.

Thankfully, in the water, I had put in enough work before plunging into that lake that I know how to swim reasonably well. I kept the initial panic at bay by talking myself down from the ledge (“Nothing, objectively is wrong, even though I feel afraid. This is not that different from what I do in the pool. I am OK.”). But mostly what I do is continue to swim. Stroke by stroke, breath by breath, I keep on doing the thing I had set out to do. The story my mind wants to create rattles along in the background. I let it be while I continue to do.

In the end, the story never vanishes, but it also doesn’t win. I swim with fear until I swim with less fear until, for at least some bits, I just swim.

These are, objectively, scary times for too many reasons.

The more we believe the worst stories our mind tells us—stories it creates to make sense of our feelings and emotions—the more power we give to those stories.

Rather than try to figure out, analyze, or beat back those stories, we often are better served by putting our heads down and doing the work we set out to do.

The work deserves that much, as do the people it serves.

Remember, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is continuing to act despite feeling fear.

Like a Match to our Fears

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

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.

 

Diagnosis, Effort, and Capability

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My six-year old daughter was moving nicely through her 7-minute piano practice session the other day when we opened up the music to a piece called Toy Soldiers. This piece breaks new ground for her by having not one but two Gs in it (up until that point she’d only played between the A and F around Middle C).

She instantly burst into tears, poor thing. “It’s too hard, I can’t do it!”

Needless to say she absolutely can do it, and did do it almost immediately after she calmed down. But even after that, this piece is still resolutely in the “too hard” category in her mind.

It’s more obvious when it’s a six-year-old who’s decided she can’t play a G, but we all do this: decide that we have some sort of limitation of our own capability when really what we’ve gotten wrong is the diagnosis.

Diagnosis of how big the problem is.

Diagnosis of what it will take to overcome it.

And most of all, mis-diagnosis of the fact that what’s keeping us from doing it is the decision that we can’t do it.

Diagnosis is our fundamental leverage point, on problems big and small. It’s the step we rush through too quickly when we think we have the solution, the step we get wrong when we’re comfortable with the way things are, and the step that is the beginning of the breakthrough when we allow ourselves the space to see clearly.

After good diagnosis comes effort, and it’s true that that bit can be hard: sustained effort, emotional effort, these things require both commitment and endurance.

But capability? The actual lack of capacity to do something? That is almost never the real problem.

Clues

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

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.

Don’t save the best for last

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Because the meeting might end before you expect it to.

Because hiding is just that.

Because you overestimate your own fear and underestimate our openness.

And, most of all, because your best deserves better.

Havdalah Reflection

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

muslim-ban_havdalah

This weekend, I went with my family to the Havdalah service at our temple. Havdalah is a celebration of the end of the Sabbath, a quiet, simple, beautiful service that ends with extinguishing an interwoven candle in a cup of wine.

We were there with other Fourth Grade parents to watch the kids reenact Havdalah Hispana, a study of the Sephardic Jewish traditions that flourished in Spain. The kids spoke about the hundreds of years of convivencia, peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians in Spain from the eighth Century until 1492, the start of the Spanish Inquisition.

At the end of the service, standing holding hands in a circle surrounded by friends and strangers, practicing shared rituals, I felt safer, more at home, and a part of something bigger than myself.

And at that moment I couldn’t help but think how, at that same moment, in every single mosque in all of the United States, congregants were probably feeling less safe, less certain, less secure. That is why I am so angry, and why what is happening feels so counter to the ideals and the values for which this country stands.

And I ask myself:

Do the people supporting the Muslim Ban not understand the impact of what they are doing?

Or do they not care?

Or worse, is this exactly what they want?

The answer to these questions will help us understand the best ways to respond.

 

The Kick

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

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.

A philanthropy problem

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

The easiest thing to forget when you are raising funds is this:

Philanthropists have a philanthropy problem

By “philanthropists” I mean people who consistently engage in philanthropy–people for whom philanthropy an important part of what they do and who they are.

Someone who has the means, the values and the practice of being active philanthropically has, by definition, a philanthropy problem. She has a set of things she is trying to make happen in the world through her philanthropy. Her problem is that it is hard to do great philanthropy, it is hard to find great people and great organizations, and it is hard to make change in the world.

Fundraisers and nonprofit professionals forget this. Maybe we find it hard to relate because we don’t feel like we have a philanthropy problem (though that’s an easy issue to address: the more we give philanthropically the more we will get in touch with this feeling.)

But mostly I think it’s a comingling two things: an overall sense of fear and intimidation (of the philanthropist—which neither she nor we want) and our lack of empathy.

The fear is connected to our misplaced sense of worth–that somehow this thing we are doing might not really be “worth it” (in every sense) and, by association, worthy of support–and, as a result, a sense that we’re intruding on the philanthropists life and time.

The lack of empathy is connected to that fear–this time our fear that we will fail in this meeting, which causes us to be centered on our selves and our worries. This chatter overwhelms our clear thinking and our open hearts. So we close our eyes to the experience of the person with whom we are trying to connect, and we lose sight of the fact that we are showing up with a solution to her problem.

Since colorful stories and images are the best way to cement memories in our brains, here’s a too-loud version of this situation from This American Life Episode 319: Cars. It’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch–there’s not a lot of heart opening and genuine connection in the car-buying business–but it shines a light on how easy it is to forget that the person in the “showroom” is there because she is has a problem she’s come there to solve.

The speaker is Sal Lanzilotta, a manager at the Chrysler Town & Country dealership in Long Island. He’s giving his salespeople a pep talk:

Sal Lanzilotta

Customer says they’re not ready to buy a car. They’re all not ready to buy a car. Let’s go over it again. They’re in a car dealership.

They got in their car, drove through hell to get here, looked for a parking spot for 10 minutes, parked, got out of the car, and walked into a car dealer, not because the coffee’s good. We went over this, because the coffee here is not good. They came here because we sell cars, and they want to buy one.

The philanthropist is sitting across from us with a philanthropy problem to solve. We are sitting across from the philanthropist with a solution that makes difference. Why do we act like we have to start with an apology?

When we boil it all down, I wonder if where we keep tripping up is in forgetting that what we have on offer is way more valuable than a car.

When you are stuck

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Go slower, to give yourself a breather.

Or go faster, because this will push your focus and intensity.

Just change speeds.

By changing speeds you’ll feel different.  By feeling different you’ll tell yourself a different story.  By telling yourself a different story you’ll discover that it’s the story, not how you feel or what you can actually do, that’s making you feel stuck in the first place.

1 to 100

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

There’s a perpetual mystique about blogging.  How do you do it?  Where do the ideas come from?  How do you find the time?  How do you keep it up?  The notion underlying the question is that sharing one’s thoughts regularly and publically about issues that matter (to you, and to your tribe) is something most of us don’t know how to do or to sustain.

1 to 100_curious georgeSo here’s some data:  In the last 18 months, I’ve written about 200 blog posts, which sounds pretty respectable.  It’s almost enough content to fill up a book.    By way of comparison, I’ve also written 18,574 emails (so sayeth Outlook – so those are just work emails).  Even as a reasonably frequent blogger, for each blog post I write I shoot out almost 100 emails.

In 18 months, I’ve written down and shared an idea, a thought, an opinion 18,574 times.  18,574 times I’ve had a point to make, and even though most of the time the point is short or simple, I have an enormous amount of daily practice in taking my ideas, writing them down, and sharing them with others whose opinion I hope to shape in some way.   My blogging pales in comparison to this, both in terms of volume and time required.  I’m sure it’s the same for you.

If you don’t want to blog (or micro-blog, or whatever) that’s fine, don’t blog. But don’t tell yourself that you don’t know how to do it, because you do.

And if you’re on the fence, maybe it’s time to stop telling yourself how this is something above or beyond you – because it isn’t – and just start.