Fear at Game Time

"Imagine that you're a team coach and you're giving your emotions a pep talk before the game. 'So how's everyone feeling about the game?' you shout.

Enthusiasm shouts back, 'I am stoked! Can't wait to get on the field!' and pumps the air with his fists, smiling, looking to everyone to smile. Anxiety is pacing in the back of the room, in his own world, and looks up briefly to say, 'I am so scared I could puke,' and keeps on pacing. Abandonment Issues says, 'Look, if we don't score in the first quarter, we should take the ball and go home-- end it before they do, you know. But, hey, I'm in!' As the coach, you're nodding, listening to each player intently, and assessing which players to put in the lead for your best chances of victory.

Fear stands up. 'Are y'all crazy? If I lose this game, I'll never play in this town again.' And then Fear starts picking on the other players. 'Enthusiasm, it just ain't natural to be that happy; you gotta get real. And anxiety! Shit, if you get on the field and have a freeze attack, we all go down.'

Finally you step in, 'All right, McFearstein, we appreciate your point of view, and you've got some good points. Now let's listen to the others.' Just like all of your emotions, Fear just wants to be seen and heard.

Confidence (who is also the team captain) says, 'I'm feeling steady. If we stay focused, this win is ours. And when we win, the offers will start pouring in.' Insecurity says, 'If you want me on the bench, I, I understand, Coach.' Well, if that's where you want to be, then that's where you'll be, you think to yourself.

Pragmatic shrugs and nods at the same time: 'Odds are stacked in our favor. Anything could happen.' Love raises her hand, 'Listen you're all fucking amazing! And I believe in every single one of you!' Woot.

Time to drop some truth bombs Coach. Time to lead, not accommodate. You can't let Fear steal more air time. And Anxiety is hanging out on the edge distracting everyone. Here's how it's got to go down: 'I echo what Love said. You're all amazing. We're contenders. Enthusiasm, you're in front; Confidence and Pragmatic have got your back. Abandonment Issues, your job is to trust your instincts. You will know when it's right to pass the ball-- we trust you. Anxiety, you're alert, and we need that on the team. You need to stay close to Confidence. The important thing to do is just stay in the game-- keep playing.

'Fear, thanks for looking out for us. Yep, we could fail, it's possible. This is risky. But we'll come out on top no matter what, because that's who we are. You've done your job, and now you'll be playing from the bench.'

When you can see fear as just an emotion that's hanging out with all of your other emotions, you gain some clearer perspective. It's not superior, and it's not even inferior. It's just an emotion that you can choose to focus on or not."

This is an excerpt from Danielle LaPorte's Fire Starter Sessions. It's one of the best things I've read about dealing with fear. Plus I was cracking up as I read it. Good information, inspiration, and humor. Can't beat that.

Showing up.

Perhaps as a symptom of my perfectionism (which I didn’t know I had until I read Brene Brown's Daring Greatly), I thought I had to, or at the very least could, fix transform my habits and traits before I went out and interacted with the dynamic world as a me I was really happy with.

But the past four years of adventuring and consistently disturbing the bounds of my comfort zone revealed a different strategy to me.

I’ve stepped into dynamic situations which called upon certain traits in me, at whatever level of development—highly polished to seriously scraggly—and revealed an even greater capacity— to be flexible, kind, strong— than I thought I had.

I’ve started to see myself as less fixed and more dynamic. Traits were called up like numbers in a Bingo game and, much to my surprise, they responded.

For example, imagine: You are alone, it’s dark and your hotel room is ½  a mile away. The only way to get there is on a dirt path through the woods by foot (no motorized transport on this island). Oh, and you’re freaked.out.scared. That was a situation I created for myself by meeting a friend for a piña colada at a restaurant half way in between where each of us was staying on Little Corn Island in Nicaragua.

Courage was called up like B7 and I was like BINGO. Yes I felt fear and for a moment it felt all encompassing, but then courage arose. Right on cue.

After the situation was over and I was safe, I got to add to my courage bank. The accumulation of these kinds of experiences (where courage or any other given quality is called upon) helps me to think of myself as more courageous.

I don’t have to will myself to be something I feel I’m not; I just show up to my life willingly, see what it asks of me, and notice what rises up in response. 

To enhance this process, I’ve been working on noticing when I have a fixed view of myself which isn’t serving me: Mary is like this, therefore she doesn’t/won’t/can’t do that. Then I actively call up exceptions in my mind. We can usually think of at least one exception which means we have some currency in the bank of the traits we want to build on.

p.s. On Little Corn Island I ran the whole way back, figuring any crazy animals or persons hiding in the woods would think I was even crazier. I highly recommend this technique for women feeling scared in foreign countries. I should also say that Little Corn is very safe because the economy is entirely dependent on tourism. My fear, like my courage, was self-created.

Photo credit: bridges&balloons

Take it away Rilke!

For the next 10 days, I'll be at a Vipassana Meditation retreat. I will be meditating silently and surely encountering limits I've never know I had as I explore my mind. This is part of my goal to do one thing every month in 2013 that challenges me and allows me to point to my comfort zone from well outside of it. There you are comfort zone.

I have some posts lined up for while I'm away since I'll also be away from the interwebs. 
Stay tuned.


Today I thought I'd let Ranier Maria Rilke do the talking. These excerpts are from Letters to a Young Poet which is in the running for my favorite book of all time.

"But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the more incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths."

"For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and fourth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity the drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us."
 

The other 99%

This time last year I was reading Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek. I've already quoted Seth Godin and Shakti Gawain on this blog so far and all three of these folks are found in very different aisles at the bookstore. I'm continually fascinated by the convergence of ideas across fields. It's really a great reminder to keep an open mind and read widely.

Tim has a ton of inspiring and motivating things to say. Today I wanted to share these treasures:

 "Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty."

And yet...

"It's lonely at the top. 99% of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things. So they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for 'realistic' goals, paradoxically make them the most time- and energy-consuming..."

Photo Credit: roujo

Enough.

"When we follow our intuitive sense of what's true and right for us, and do what we genuinely feel energy for, we always seem to have enough money to be, do, and have the things we truly need and want." Shakti Gawain from "Creating True Prosperity" Skakti was writing about prosperity so it makes sense that she writes about money in the quote above. When I read this quote I sometimes plug in the words "resources," "energy," "support," "courage" or "conviction" in place of the word "money," because it feels more expansive to me. Do you ever walk into something you are obligated to do, but strongly do not want to do and notice that things just seem to keep getting worse? That's how we got the expression, "When it rains it pours." In both cases, the same principle applies. So I guess the question is, what's it raining?

That's what I want.

Where do you see yourself in one-year? Five-years? Thirty years? We are encouraged to think about these things, set goals, and create strategies (we usually call them “plans”) to achieve them. For me this is an anxiety provoking activity because it directs my thinking only to professional accomplishments (the career path) and to specific personal accomplishments that are linked to things (buying a house, buying a nice car, buying a boat) or to fulfilling cultural norms (getting married, taking sweet vacations, having kids, etc).

Though thinking about where we want our career and personal lives to go can certainly be useful, I wonder why we don’t spend time reflecting on who and how we want to be in addition to what we want to have.

Especially because when we think of what we want to have or accomplish, it points directly to how we want to be, what we need and value and, the big one, how we want to feel.

What we want is directly related to the feeling we believe we will experience when we get it.

Here’s a personal example:

When I was a student, I never wanted to cease being a student. I excelled in the academic environment and was rewarded with good grades. Naturally, I decided to extend my education, attend college and then graduate school. Being a professor, I thought, would be supremely awesome because I’d get paid to hang out forever in the academic world.

There was one problem though. I hated graduate school. It was a rude awakening for me about politics in academia. It wasn’t just about learning, researching, reading, and teaching. I slogged it out for two years enduring all kinds of physical ailments (a good indicator for me that I’m out of alignment with my values) and mental anguish. It was difficult, but I finally decided to leave.

This happened four years ago and it’s taken all four of those years (and the 23 before them) for me to understand that graduate school and academia was a strategy.

It wasn’t that I wanted the PhD or the career of a professor, per say. It was that I assumed that those things would give me: a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and contribution, meaning in my life, a constant well of creativity and stimulation in ways that mattered to me, and a whole host of other things that would meet needs that I have. And when those needs were met I’d be happy.

It was difficult and devastating to make the decision to leave graduate school and walk into the great Unknown because I was so attached to that strategy as “the one” that would lead to happiness.

What’s so expansive to realize now is that there are infinite strategies that can stimulate the feelings we want to be feeling and to contribute to the needs we are trying to meet. The key is to be in touch with what we want to be feeling and then to examine many elements of our lives and ask ourselves: Are these activities bringing me more into alignment with the feelings I want to feel, or less? And then, make changes accordingly.

How do you want to feel?