The power to mobilize resources

September 29, 2010September 29, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Remember that old, broken conventional wisdom about how fundraising works in the nonprofit sector– a few folks that sit in the corner while the rest of the people do the important program work over here?

Just the other day I was talking with the new class of Acumen Fund Fellows – as impressive a class as we’ve ever had – and I was struck with how important it is to strike at the heart of this destructive, outdated mindset.

What I shared with them (more emphatically than I or they expected, I suspect) is that for anyone, for absolutely anyone, who plans to make change by working in the nonprofit / social enterprise sector, the ability to mobilize capital behind your idea is one of the most important, most untaught, most underdeveloped skills around.

If you can get funding, you can set up shop, you can create breakthrough approaches that cut through the status quo, you can make things happen.

It’s ironic, actually, because in the high-tech world, successfully pitching a top-tier VC fund is fetishized even while the capital needed to launch technology businesses keeps decreasing. Yet in the nonprofit sector where by definition we are in the business of addressing social issues in a way that the market is not – as it currently is structured – built to address, the ability to mobilize resources is downplayed in its importance.

So let me be as clear as possible: this is a skill required of all you who aspire to be leaders in our space. We need you to learn how to do this because we need you to make lasting, large-scale change.

Please don’t put this off or think someone’s going to do it for you. And please don’t think that just because you don’t know any really wealthy people that you can’t start working on this now.

The first shift you can make is to acknowledge that this is something you want to learn how to do. That intention alone will unlock your potential, will set you apart from your peers, will set you down the path that you’re going to need to walk – and going to want to walk – sooner than you know.

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WWYD?

September 15, 2010September 14, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

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?

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Too busy to do the scary stuff

July 20, 2010July 19, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

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.

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Old Spice Viral Video Madness

July 16, 2010July 16, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

You only get to be first once, of course.

By now you’ve see these Old Spice YouTube videos. They are hilarious, Saturday Night Live skit-worthy comedy in 30 second spots put up in real time on YouTube in response to Tweets. To promote Old Spice!!

The agency producing them, Wieden+Kennedy, has been shooting nearly 100 of these a day, and everyone is talking about them. Google’s CFO just mentioned the ads on an earnings call, calling it “a glimpse of where the world is going.”

(Full backstory here, including 6 of the videos.)

You can’t plan for this kind of thing. It’s not like the folks at Wieden+Kennedy and the team at P&G said, as they were doing the TV commercials: “So if these things are wildly popular and they start exploding through social media, should we be ready to film 100 mini-commercials a day and throw them up on YouTube, without approval from all the people whose job it is to say no to this kind of thing?”

No, that’s not what happened.

What happened is that they created a system that was designed to move and to say yes, built on trust. The people whose job it was to dumb it down and mediocre it out either spoke their peace early on or got out of the way.

So they come in first.

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Whence “fear”?

February 25, 2010February 25, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

So what’s with all this talk about fear anyhow?

A lot of friends contacted me directly about my last two posts, asking one of two things:

1. Were you writing about me?

2. What are you so afraid of, anyhow?

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction. First, because it’s a little taboo to admit that you have real fears. And second, because all of us – but especially us over-schooled folks who have been rewarded throughout our lives for understanding the rules and playing by them – were taught to internalize fear. Fear can drive you to get good grades. Fear can get you into the right schools. Fear can make you a good employee – for a while, at least.

(And I’m not saying that being terrified gets you success. I’m saying that staying within the lines – first at school, and then at work – works pretty well in most places for at least a while. And staying within the lines and following all the rules can teach you to be afraid of breaking out, afraid of putting yourself in a situation where there are no lines or rules.)

So why is fear on my mind right now? It’s because a friend and great supporter of mine has been asking me to look myself in the mirror and figure out what’s keeping me from that next professional breakthrough.

So what’s my answer? Since I’m pretty good at explaining things (to myself as much as to others) my first reaction is full of explanations: “Well, it’s because…” I begin.

And there are, to be sure, good reasons. But if I think there’s a kernel of truth in the question I’m being asked, if I think it’s possible that being more fearless would help, isn’t it appropriate to explore: How much do I believe these explanations? Do I believe them completely? Do I believe I’m acting like I really want to break through (which is different from thinking and saying I want to break through)? And by acting, I mean structuring all my time and all my days around getting there – and being willing to sacrifice the urgent for the important?

Am I doing a good job? Yes. Is what I want to accomplish hard? Yes. Important? Yes. Worth putting myself on the line for? Yes.

So am I doing everything I could? No, probably not.

I bet you’re in the same situation: you’re doing a good enough job too. You want to accomplish hard, important things that are worth putting yourself on the line for. And you too could do more than you are right now, you could commit and re-commit yourself, and doing so would help you get there.

And if I can pass along the nudge that I’m getting to all of you… Well then I’ve done my part to give a gift as valuable as the one I’ve received.

So that’s what all the talk about fear is about. It’s a gift.

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The fear reels

February 24, 2010February 22, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Buddhists have a name for the constant chatter in our minds, the reel that keeps playing, pretending to be in the background, talking through our fears – they call it the “monkey mind.”

The monkey mind is the stream from one thought to the next to the next (“what did she mean by that email?…what does she think of me anyway?…I’m not sure I can pull this off…what if we don’t, then what…?…). But it’s a treadmill – you never get anywhere, never reach any conclusions.

It’s pernicious because it’s pervasive and passive – so you may never confront it head on, and never understand how much it is holding you back.

I’ve found two pieces of advice helpful in taking this on. The first was suggested by a yoga teacher years ago. He said, at the start of class,“Take all the things that are worrying you, that are troubling and stressful and on your mind, and leave them outside of class – on the sidewalk. Just for the duration of class. I promise you they’ll be there waiting for you when class is over.”

I love this because it’s so practical and it’s actually asking less of us, so it feels possible: don’t stop worrying forever, don’t pretend that you will simply rise above. Just commit to leaving the worries aside for 90 minutes. By promising yourself that you get to go back to your worries, you discover that it is easier to let go of them. And sometimes, leaving them aside temporarily can free you from them permanently.

There’s another approach, equally deliberate, which is the opposite of letting go of the chatter: go straight towards the chatter, address the thoughts and take them all the way to resolution. Instead of letting go of the loop, you break through by moving forward and making a commitment to a resolution. The circle is broken, and the next time the thoughts start, you have broken the reel, and you’re free.

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Fear-less training

February 23, 2010February 22, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What if you decided that the one thing you care most about is being less fearful? If this mattered more than anything else, what would you do?

(I don’t mean fear of real things, like jumping out of planes or off of cliffs or in front of tigers. I mean fear of doing things you know you want to do and can do and should do…but don’t do).

How many times would you commit to confronting the fearful situation this month? This year?

How much time would you spend articulating, to people you trust (mentors, friends, spouses, supervisors, your dog), the thing you’re fearful of and why?

Would you write out what you’re afraid of somewhere? Would you put it down on paper so you could look it square in the eyes, try it on for size, and see how mean and scary it really is (or isn’t)?

Would you start more things? Would you send them out more quickly? Would you figure out where you sabotage yourself just when you’re getting off the ground? Would you discover that you’re the only one who’s convinced you can’t do it?

The first thing, I think, is deciding – really deciding – that you want to be less fearful.

Once you’ve decided that, what would you do?

(For example, would you say, “Yeah, that’s interesting,” and then go on to the next blog you read or the next email?)

I know I would, and will, do more than I’m doing now.

You?

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The toothless monster

February 3, 2010February 4, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Speaking of fear, just recently something exceptional just happened to me: I had the absolutely worst fundraising meeting I’ve had since starting my job at Acumen Fund three years ago. It’s not worth going into the specifics…suffice it to say it was unpleasant and transactional in the worst way. Paint your worst picture of what a fundraising meeting could be, and that was this meeting.

I admit, I was a little shaken for a little while. I had to vent some to a couple of folks to clear the air.

And then, almost right away, it was done. The feeling was gone, the meeting was in the past. And no real harm was done. The actual experience of the thing I feared – the thing that can keep me and you from picking up the phone or putting yourself out there or standing in front of an audience or pitching a new, crazy idea or going with your gut – was exposed. And it was so much less powerful or meaningful than the picture I’d drawn over time.

There’s the lurking monster I imagined, and the reality that it had no teeth.

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Damn handstands

February 2, 2010February 1, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I recently went to a two-and-a-half hour yoga workshop with Doug Swenson. Doug teaches Ashtanga yoga, a style I don’t normally practice, and the workshop was pretty advanced.

On top of that, with a busy life and two young kids, my own yoga practice has become intermittent. So maybe I’d have been better off going to a regular class, but there I was. And by about 10 minutes into the workshop, it was clear that about half the students were very regular / advanced practitioners: handstands and crazy balances and strength, flexibility and grace abounded.

And so began a quiet, almost inaudible, pernicious voice-over in my own head, “Well, this is clearly all they do…practice yoga all day long. Don’t they have other priorities? Who does she think she is anyway, showing off like that at the start of class?” Over and over and over and over, getting louder and louder and louder.

That voice in my head is the voice of fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of being embarrassed and of standing out. It’s the voice of adolescence. It’s the voice that worries about fitting in. It’s the voice that thinks others are judging, maybe even laughing just a little bit.

This voice is a prison.

And it’s so powerful because no one else hears it. So you can pretend that it’s not out there, that it doesn’t have you in its clutches, that it’s not directing your choices, even when it is.

In the yoga class, I kept on breathing, I acknowledged the voice and the fear, and it (mostly) lost its power. Not completely, but mostly.

And that’s a start.

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Of diving boards and backflips

July 28, 2009July 27, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

I was lucky enough to spend some time on vacation last week near a beautiful lake in France. Crystalline, cool waters, looming mountains all around, and kids everywhere jumping and diving into the water with abandon.

I watched the scene from a floating platform 50 feet out in the lake. I noticed that the two lifeguards on duty, responsible for more than 100 swimmers, mostly talked to each other. Parents stayed on the grass, relaxing and chatting. No one hovered. And all the while kids from 4 to 14 (and a few who were 44 and 64) bounded off of a high diving board, doing backflip after backflip into the water (often almost landing on one another). It felt like another era.

Contrast this with the public pools in NY, where I go with my kids, and the constant cacophony of lifeguard whistles, nearly nonstop, telling each and every kid all the rules they are breaking. No diving, no rollicking, no horseplay, no running. No, no, no, no, no.

It may well be that kids are safer at the public pools in NY, that there are fewer accidents. But it may also be that all the whistle-blowing and intensive supervision doesn’t do anything at all for safety, but takes a lot of the fun out of childhood.

We often act – especially in the U.S. – as if there’s no harm done in being just a little bit safer, having just a few more precautions. But it feels a little like the proliferation of low-fat and diet-conscious food while obesity rates soar — somehow we may be barking up the wrong tree, attacking obvious symptoms that have little to do with the real problem.

Sitting on the dock, watching those kids in France bombing into the water, it reminded me of what childhood used to be. And it made me worry that what we’re really teaching a generation of kids is fear — this at a time when what we need more than ever is audacity and fearlessness.

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Tag: fear

The power to mobilize resources

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WWYD?

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Too busy to do the scary stuff

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Old Spice Viral Video Madness

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Whence “fear”?

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The fear reels

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Fear-less training

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The toothless monster

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Damn handstands

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Of diving boards and backflips

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