by Pamela Slim
Piers asked him what we needed to do as a country to “keep America great.”
His answer made me sit up in my chair.
“I think in order to keep America great, we have to keep America creative.”
I think he hit it on the head.
We love to argue. To point fingers. To debate.
That will not solve our economic problems, nor make us feel powerful.
We are made to create. We feel useful when we create. We release our “stuckness” when we create. We reinvent our lives, tell new stories, and rebuild communities when we create. We reclaim our esteem, our muse, and our hope when we create.
It is why your particular work mode does not matter. If you are creating something of value and personal meaning, does it really matter if you are self-employed, freelancing, or employed by a corporation or nonprofit?
The act of creating is what sets us free, what gives our life meaning. And it is what will put us back on our personal and collective path to greatness.
Exercise: Pocket Planner
The new world of work is a series of creative projects. What is the next thing you want to add to your body of work? Use this planner to sketch it out, and get busy creating!
What do you want to create?
Name it. Describe it.
(A book, a job, a video, an app)
Who is it for?
Describe your audience.
(Specific details about who they are)
Why does it need to get done?
Describe the roots of the project.
(How does this fit in your body of work? Who will be affected by it? What good thing will happen as the result of you completing it? )
How are you going to structure the project?
Define a model.
(Who has done something like this before? How was it structured? How can you customize this model and make it your own?)
When does it need to be done?
Set a deadline.
(Nothing happens without a deadline. Set a date, and work your project plan backward.)
Next: Create a prototype so you can test the idea in the easiest and quickest way possible, with the fewest amount of resources.
CHAPTER 6
Surf the Fear
Pain can be almost impossible to bear, but suffering is even more difficult. When you refuse to accept pain, you will suffer. When you cling to getting what you want and refuse to accept what you have, you will suffer. Fighting reality, opposing the inevitable, or struggling against what is—causes suffering.
—Dr. Brent Menninger
Rafe Eric Biggs was a leadership coach in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a PhD in organizational psychology. He worked with managers and teams in Silicon Valley. He was handsome and athletic, with an active social life.
Always interested in expanding his training and certifications, Rafe got a coaching degree in somatic education, a body-centered approach to personal development. “I was integrating the work in my coaching, and then I felt a deeper calling to study more about transformation and healing.”
At the same time, the economy was slowing down, and Rafe decided to take a break from work to travel internationally for an extended period. His girlfriend at the time was a massage therapist and wanted to go to Thailand to study Thai massage. So they packed up their house, put everything in storage, and took off on an adventure.
For four months, he lived in Thailand, studying massage and enjoying the slow pace and relaxed lifestyle. His girlfriend went back to the United States, and they eventually decided to take a break from dating.
“I was probably paying, like, seven dollars a night for a beach bungalow, and I was living so inexpensively,” Rafe said. “I was able to learn about shamanic healing and take yoga workshops, [attend] meditation retreats, and meet some really amazing people. So I was kind of inspired by that and just really enjoying being in the moment and just choosing to do whatever I wanted to do. It was such freedom. After four months, I wanted to go somewhere else. And I was going to go to Bali because I wanted to study more about shamanism and spirituality. Then a friend of mine said, ‘Well, if you really want to learn about spirituality, you should go to India.’ I had a little bit of fear about going there because I heard about people getting really sick. But when my friend said, ‘You should go to India,’ there was a voice inside me that said very clearly, ‘Go to India.’ I accepted that that is where I was supposed to go.”
Rafe flew to New Delhi and was overwhelmed by the amount of people and stimulation. So he headed to Dharamshala, near the Dalai Lama’s home, and decided to do a ten-day silent meditation retreat.
“I was able to really confront a lot of my own fears about myself, and I was able to get to a place of stillness and clarity about what I wanted to do next in my life. What I realized was that I really wanted to live more in a community with other like-minded people and I wanted to find a way to live a much more simple life without having to work so hard.”
At the end of the retreat, Rafe and his friends had a celebratory dinner on a patio rooftop of a guesthouse. After dinner, people started dancing, and he noticed that there was no guardrail around the perimeter of the roof. He saw a candle and picked it up to go set it by the edge.
“As I walked towards the edge of the roof, the candle light just blinded me for a split second and I stepped off and I fell about ten or twelve feet. The next thing I know, I’m laying on my back, looking at the stars, and I was like, ‘Wow. How did I get here?’ So I tried to sit up and I couldn’t. I was like, ‘Oh crap, something’s wrong.’ But you know, I wasn’t really in a state of fear. I think it was from all the meditation I did. I said, ‘Everything’s fine. I’m going to be okay.’”
After being rushed to the hospital and having surgery, Rafe woke up and was told he was paralyzed from the chest down. He suddenly had to face life as a quadriplegic.
Fear is inevitable
One of the most wonderful, and terrifying, things about life is that we have no idea how it is going to turn out.
We get sick or injured. People we love die. The economy crashes. Spouses leave. A business partner runs away with our money. We take a big risk to be creative in our presentation and fail miserably, in public.
Because the new world of work is unstable and unpredictable, uncertainty, fear, and doubt are inevitable parts of building your body of work.
Managing fear and uncertainty is core to thriving and surviving in this environment.
Rafe said, “I believe that my calling going to India was to have a spiritual awakening, and that happened. It just wasn’t the way I thought it was going to happen.”
Most of us cannot imagine having such an enlightened attitude about life after experiencing such a devastating setback. But Rafe leaned on the skills he had developed in the years he had been an organizational consultant and coach, especially his somatic coaching.
While it is normal for people to get depressed or afraid about the unknown, the key is to keep moving forward by focusing on the future. If you focus on what you want in your life instead of what you don’t want, you’ll see your opportunities expand.
In order to develop resilience in the face of fear and uncertainty like Rafe, you need four skills.
Skill 1: View adversity as a means of growth
Skill 2: Diagnose your fear
Skill 3: Process the unexpected
Skill 4: Overcome distress and procrastination
Skill 1: View adversity as a means of growth
In the startup world, we love to tell stories of how the most successful people faced adversity. We hear about the catastrophic product launches, bankruptcy, divorce, and health scares—all part of the hero’s journey to becoming a wealthy, successful businessperson.
A typical entrepreneur success formula
Register business name.
&n
bsp; Launch website.
Try to sell something.
Have massive humiliating failure.
Make a change.
Have massive success.
Hire one thousand employees.
Write a book describing said humiliating failure followed by massive success.
Plan speaking tour and tell humiliating failure story, followed by dramatic business success story.
Appear on cover of Inc. magazine in confident pose.
Tell failure and success story on the Today show.
Sell your company to Google.
Repeat.
Such success is actually very rare, but failure is always an essential part of the story.
So if failure is such a key element of business lore, why do we get upset when it happens to us? It’s because we think that our particular humiliating failure is much greater than the failures of those we admire.
Sure, Richard Branson says, “There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over.”
But inside you say, “Surely Richard Branson has never really struggled, or if he did, it was over something as minuscule as a typo. I am sure he felt absolutely confident in his ability to become a billionaire business person. He is Richard Branson, after all.”
My take?
Richard Branson felt the same humiliation and fear when failing that you may be feeling about some aspect of your life at this moment. He just got up and kept going. And he chose not to turn his failure into shame.
Checklist
No matter the severity of the challenge you are facing, ask yourself these questions:
This experience is:
preparing me to do great work.
preparing me to be a smarter, kinder, or more compassionate person.
teaching me exactly what I need to know so I can create better, more effective work.
reminding me of what my true, natural strengths are and aren’t.
pushing me to make an urgent decision about something that is critical to my well-being.
teaching me what I need to get help with, outsource, or stop doing.
teaching me to have more patience.
fulfilling my destiny.
After his accident and physical therapy, Rafe became interested in dating again but faced the challenge of navigating a new world of sexuality after disability.
“There are a lot of people I notice with disabilities, including myself, who feel like that part of their life feels kind of cut off, and so they have to figure out new ways to be intimate with their partners. That’s when I started really exploring sexuality and disability and started doing research.”
Rafe now coaches individuals and couples who are navigating sexuality and disability, and is developing online courses with a partner to serve this market.
By establishing new roots of meaning, and finding purpose in finding answers to his own questions, he is expanding and deepening his own body of work.
When I first heard the news of Rafe’s accident, I worried what his life would be like. Now, I am inspired by his story and use it to motivate myself when I get scared, overwhelmed, or frustrated.
If Amanda Wang (from chapter 2) and Rafe can learn to lead positive lives of great contribution, and continue to build impressive bodies of work despite serious mental and physical restrictions, so can you.
Frame your adversity as a temporary setback and keep building your body of work.
Skill 2: Diagnose your fear
Your fear shares critical information with you multiple times a day. We are often encouraged to “crush the fear,” “ignore the fear,” or “stomp on fear.”
I prefer to surf the fear.
Author and coach Martha Beck describes the part of our brain that generates a lot of ongoing fear in her book Steering by Starlight.
One of the deepest layers of your brain is a neural structure that first evolved in early vertebrates—specifically, reptiles. Because of this, scientists call it the reptilian brain. It’s wrapped around your brain stem, deep in the center of your head, like the serpent twined around the knowledge tree in the Garden of Eden. . . . The entire purpose of your reptilian brain is to continuously broadcast survival fears—alarm reactions that keep animals alive in the wild. These fears fall into two categories: lack and attack. On one hand, our reptilian brains are convinced that we lack everything we need: We don’t have enough love, time, money, everything. On the other hand, something terrible is about to happen. A predator—human or animal—is poised to snatch us!
The protective instinct of your lizard brain can help you develop tremendous awareness and a healthy, motivated attitude toward your success.
When you are gripped by fear, you need to slow down and process the emotion in the rational part of your brain.
Try to talk through your fears with a compassionate person. If that’s not possible, write down the answers to these questions:
What are you afraid of?
Why are you afraid of it?
What do you need to know to reduce the fear?
If you were to practice this thing that you are afraid of doing, would it get better?
Is this thing you are afraid of something that is negative or unhealthy for you, or a positive opportunity for growth?
If this is a positive opportunity for growth, who do you know who might be able to help you overcome your fear?
Full-color, full-contact living
The first-time advice about defense in mixed martial arts seems crazy.
A large-fisted person is coming toward you with a side hook, and you are advised to cover the side of your face with your arm and lean in to the blow.
It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. When your face is protected, leaning into the oncoming punch breaks the speed of the movement with all of your body weight. As soon as you defend and stop the punch, you are in perfect range to launch an uppercut to your opponent’s jaw.
But while your mind understands that it makes sense, every bit of your instinct tells you to run like hell.
The same thing happens when fear, discomfort, uncertainty, or doubt slips into our lives.
Whether we are making a positive change that invokes fear (going for a promotion, waiting to hear about a book deal, speaking in front of a large audience for the first time), the instinct is to avoid fear and anxiety.
Our best defense in life is to lean into the fear. Feel the emotion. Take a blow or two in order to really learn what you need to protect.
As Kelly Fiori tells me if I tense up during a self-defense practice, “Relax! Take a second to assess your situation, then you can react with your muscle memory.”
The $4,000 thought
In 2012, I was on a coaching call with Antrese Wood, an artist client who had a significant goal to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter so she could travel to all the provinces of Argentina and paint the people and places that defined the country. She had raised $8,400 so far, with twelve days to go for her thirty-day campaign and was frustrated with the stalled momentum. Too shy to reach out to people who had already supported the project, she said, “I don’t want to bug the people who have donated to the project with updates about what I am doing. It is my job to make this happen.”
I immediately saw that this attitude was causing stalled momentum, not a lack of interest from supporters.
“What if you thought about it differently?” I said. “What if you thought, ‘People who have signed up to support the project are excited to see it succeed. If I ask for help, I am opening an opportunity for them to get more involved in
the project and more excited.’”
She changed her thought, sent a project update to current supporters, and twenty-four hours later, her project had raised $4,000 more toward her goal.
The only difference between an idea and a concrete, live piece of your body of work is the thought that triggers your action.
Your thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions drive everything in your life and career.
People who operate on a high level of creativity and mastery are rigorous about mental awareness and preparation. Top athletes, fighters, artists, writers, businesspeople, and scientists use different methods to stay clear, focused, motivated, and productive.
Not only are precise and motivating thoughts critical to maintaining momentum toward big goals, but the ability to look at things from new and critical perspectives is a fundamental skill in creating a diverse, interesting, and integrated body of work.
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT AND NOTHING IS HAPPENING
Renita Kalhorn is a peak-performance coach and Juilliard-trained classical pianist and has an MBA and black belt in taekwon-do. She mentors Navy SEAL candidates in mental toughness and counts NASA and Fortune 500 CEOs among her clients.
She suggests this exercise when you feel like you aren’t making any progress in your projects:
If you can’t change your circumstances, you need to change the way you think about the circumstances.
Grab a pen and piece of paper. This three-step “perspective reset” will take less than twenty minutes and is guaranteed to rekindle motivation (do it alone or as a team).
1. Make a “Things I’ve (We’ve) Done” list.
As a species, humans are predisposed to notice the negative. No matter where we are in life, we tend to focus on how long it’s taking to get “over there” and where we want to go—totally discounting how far we’ve come.
So Step 1 is to acknowledge what you’ve done: the clients you do have, the development progress you have made, the sales/traffic you have accumulated. This helps you regain your equilibrium and reaffirm that you haven’t been doing nothing.