Category: Fear

Navigating Fear…A Personal Guide to Freedom and Growth

Fear is like that well-meaning friend who occasionally oversteps boundaries. It’s a survival instinct, a leftover trait from our ancestors who needed it to avoid becoming someone else’s lunch. It can guide us toward wise choices and help us steer clear of danger.

Our imagination, on the other hand, is a bit of a storyteller, especially when it comes to tales that can hold us back. With all our experiences and secrets tucked away in our minds, our imagination can whip up some remarkably dreadful future scenarios. And our lizard brains? They thrive on responding to fear.

Fear is undoubtedly real. The fear of failure, loss, embarrassment, injury, loneliness, helplessness, and death can have profound impacts on our thoughts and actions. However, if we recognize, understand, and confront these fears head-on, it will be like flicking on the lights in a dark room – suddenly, the monsters lose their scariness.

By acknowledging that fear is a living part of us, we can take steps toward asserting our control over it. Fear shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat. 

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” – Psalm 23

We aren’t alone in this journey of conquering fear. We have a loving God, supportive family, and caring friends to help us face our fears. They can offer a broader perspective and lend a hand when we need it most.

Life is a rollercoaster of unknowns, and fear hates rollercoasters. Instead of fearing the unknown, befriend it. New ideas, experiences, and relationships? Embrace them as opportunities, be curious, and let the adventure unfold.

Life is rarely easy, and sometimes truly terrible things happen to us. But, fear should be the backseat driver, not our navigator.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And, when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

–Paul Atreides in the novel Dune, by Frank Herbert

Photo: Why hot air balloons? Well, taking a ride in a hot air balloon would not be possible if we let fear make the decision. I’m happy to report the balloon ride was amazing!

I have one favor to ask:  If you find this information useful, please forward and recommend it to someone else.  Thanks! 

DAWA, Coronavirus, and Normal

I remember thinking how simple it all sounded, and I was relieved to know I had a model to follow. What I didn’t know at the time is that this simple model is anything but simple…

 

Denial.

Anger.

Withdrawal.

Acceptance.

I first learned about these stages of grief when Grandma Anne died (over 30 years ago).  My cousin, who was a newly minted police officer at the time, described how he received training on this model in the police academy.

I remember thinking how simple it all sounded, and I was relieved to know I had a model to follow.  What I didn’t know at the time is that this simple model is anything but simple.

Models provide a basis for understanding a concept or an idea…and that’s helpful.  Models make the complex seem simple.  But models rarely capture the layers of detail or the often-gut-wrenching processes they describe.

Today, the DAWA model is a bit outdated.  Additional “stages” have been added over the years to the original model.  Stages like shock, bargaining, depression, and testing are layered into discussions of the grieving process nowadays.

How does all of this relate to the Coronavirus?

Thanks to Coronavirus, we are suddenly sharing a grief experience with every person on the planet, at the same time.  Every single one of us has lost something extremely important because of Coronavirus.

The normal that we knew, the normal that we understood, the normal that we took for granted…died over the last 30-60 days.  If you could ask all 6 billion-plus people on Earth when, exactly, normal died, their answers would vary by a few days or few weeks.  But nobody would deny that their normal is gone.

When we grieve or face a major crisis in our lives, we come together with others, we gather closer to the people we love, we comfort each other with hugs and shared laughter.  We cry together.  We cook together.  We share meals.  We share stories about what we’ve lost.  We might go to an inspirational concert and hold hands while we sway and sing along with tears streaming down our faces.

We love to be with people, even if we describe ourselves as introverts or “not a people person.”

Unfortunately, that part of normal has also died (at least for a while).

While it doesn’t look like it (because our beloved normal is gone), we are all grieving.  Every one of us.

Make no mistake about it.  Something we loved, something we treasure, and something we counted on has died.  We are grieving our loss, even as events unfold in front of us that may make things worse before they get better.

We probably don’t think we have time right now to grieve.  But, we’re each somewhere on the DAWA continuum of denial, anger, withdrawal, or acceptance.  In fact, we’re bouncing around on that continuum today.

We’ve lost our normal, and we’re being forced to live in a new normal.  This new normal will probably give way to yet another new normal a few months from now.  None of us know what any of this will look like.  That mystery is an unfortunate part of our new normal (as crazy as it may sound).

It’s normal to be in denial.  It’s normal to be angry.  It’s normal to withdraw or try to escape.  It’s also normal, and necessary, to find acceptance.

Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up.  It means that the energy we’ve been using to fight the new normal can be channeled toward making the best of what’s in front of us.

Sure, we all miss our beloved normal from the past.  We’d prefer to have our old normal back in our lives.  But we must find a way to accept, to allow ourselves to rest, and let go of our longing.

The good news is that we’ve each had normal die before.  We’ve had to adjust to new normals throughout our life and we’re generally pretty good at it:

  • Moving from one school to another and making new friends
  • Graduating high school or college
  • Starting our first “real” job
  • Leaving our first job
  • Starting our second job
  • Meeting the person of our dreams that we plan to spend the rest of our life with
  • Divorcing that person
  • Experiencing the death of a loved one
  • Becoming a parent (or a grandparent)
  • Starting your own business
  • Selling that business
  • Losing a house and everything we own in a fire
  • The knee injury that forced you to stop playing your favorite game
  • Having your house destroyed in a tornado

These are all examples of events in our lives that require us to let go of the old normal and embrace the new normal.  Sometimes the new normal is because of something amazingly good, and other times it’s caused by something amazingly bad.

I’m not sure I’ve reached the acceptance stage in my own grieving process.  I tell myself that I’m there, but I know it’s not always true.  As I work through the process and prepare myself for what lies ahead, I like to keep this list of ideas in mind:

  • Take things one day at a time
  • Prayer is your instant connection to someone who loves you completely
  • Celebrate your victories, no matter how small
  • Give yourself a break
  • Be grateful and enjoy what you have
  • Forgive yourself for not knowing exactly what to do (none of us know, which is true a lot more than we’d like to admit)
  • Only allow yourself to worry about the future for a few minutes each day and move on. I’d say to stop worrying completely since worrying is a non-productive use of energy, but I know it’s not possible to eliminate it completely.
  • Check-in once each day for the news on Coronavirus, and what the latest government directions are (social distancing, masks or no masks, etc.). By now, you know the symptoms, what you’re supposed to be doing to prevent the spread, and what you’re supposed to do if you or someone close to you become symptomatic.  The rest is probably not super useful, and you can catch-up on all of it during your once-a-day check in.
  • Be kind to others. Your kindness will go a long way and may lead to more kindness in your “downstream.”  Even a smile to a stranger letting them know we’re all in this together is helpful.  By the way, your eyes show your smile, even if your mask doesn’t.
  • Realize that you are grieving, and so is everyone else. We will each have good days and bad days in our grief journey.
  • Take time to gather with your friends and family members by phone, video conference, or even a nice email note.  These are your people.  Embrace them remotely.

We are living through future history.  The events happening around us and to us today will be discussed, debated, and written about for decades to come.  Our lives are forever changed, and the changes are continuing to unfold.

We can use our energy to reach back to the past with all that we have, searching for the normal that’s gone.

Or, we can channel our energy to reach toward the future, creating the best possible new normal for ourselves and our loved ones.

While I grieve for the past, I choose to reach for the future.

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

What you delegate matters…

There isn’t a human being on this planet who can carry an entire organization themselves…

Whether you run a Fortune 500 company or a one-person shop, your ability to delegate will be the difference between success and failure.  Delegation may be to an employee or a trusted vendor.

Delegation allows you to multiply yourself.  It also provides an opportunity for your direct reports to grow within your company.

Right about now, you should be nodding and saying, “Obviously, Bob, tell me something I don’t know!”

So, you understand the importance of delegating.  Awesome!

Consider these questions about what you’re delegating, based on the way some managers and company owners I’ve worked with over the past 35 years view the topic:

  • When you delegate, are you focusing on your schedule, or on your direct reports’ growth?
  • Do you view delegation as the art of offloading tasks you don’t want to do, or tasks that are better suited to the expertise of one or more of your direct reports?
  • Do your direct reports own a specific role or job that’s critical to your organization, or are they merely one of your assistants, waiting for a list of today’s tasks to come from you?
  • If you draw a flowchart of how your organization functions, how many of the process lines route through your head where some type of decision or approval takes place before the process can move to its next step?
  • How many employees do you have waiting to talk to you? Do you feel empowered by how long the line out your door is each day?
  • When faced with a crisis, or a short-term deadline, do you pull back all that you’ve delegated so you can do everything yourself to make sure it’s right?
  • When you delegate the responsibility for a task to an employee, do you trust them enough to also delegate the authority they need to own that task? If not, why not?

I worked with a manager many years ago who told me how great it was that he had a line of people waiting to see him every time he came back to his office.  He said it was the first time he had felt important in his life.  Wrong answer, Mr. Important Guy!

I worked with another who told me that, “These people (referring to pretty much everyone in his department) don’t work well under pressure.  Whenever we have a tight deadline on a deliverable, I usually stay late and get it done myself.  That way I know it’s right.”  Wrong answer, Mr. Martyr!

There isn’t a human being on this planet who can carry an entire organization themselves…even though many try.  Sometimes, they even fool themselves (and others) into thinking they do it successfully.

The power of any organization comes from its ability to properly delegate, multiply its talent, and foster employee growth.  By the way, sometimes the cost of that growth is allowing your employees to make mistakes, or to successfully complete a task in a different way than you would have.

Get delegation right, and everyone wins.  Get it wrong, and your employees will stop learning.  Their motivation will wane and your organization will ultimately fail.

It’s only a matter of time.

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Premature Judging

The easiest approach is to prematurely judge, declare failure and decide who to blame…

Should a new home construction project be judged when only its blueprint exists?  How about when the site has been prepared?  What about when the materials like wood, rebar, and electrical conduit are delivered?

Should we wait to judge the home build until the framing is complete?  Should we wait until the walls and roof are added?  Or, wait until all the windows are installed?  What about the paint and other finishing touches on the house?  Should you wait for those to be completed?

Can you judge the success of the home build before it’s finished?

When making chocolate chip cookies, do you judge the success of the cookies while mixing the ingredients?  How about when the chocolate chips are poured into the batter?

What if the recipe called for real butter, but you only have that non-diary butter substitute that’s supposed to be healthier than butter?  Are your cookies doomed at that point?  Should you call-off the project and declare it a failure?

Assuming you’ve made it past the butter/non-dairy butter issue, is it right to judge the cookies after they’re spooned out onto the cookie sheet, but not yet baked?

Just before placing those filled cookie sheets into the preheated oven, is that the time to re-evaluate the entire cookie-making process to determine if it’s failing?  Should you call a meeting to discuss whether the cooking temperature listed in the recipe is the correct one for your cookies?

Houses and cookies are obvious examples of “projects” that have a lot of moving parts.  They build from a set of raw ingredients, mixed with time and effort, into a completed item.

What about less obvious events in our lives?  When’s the right time to judge these for success or failure (using whatever measures you’ve chosen)?

  • new job
  • new business
  • new business strategy
  • new information system
  • new software development project
  • new friends
  • new marriage
  • new workout regimen
  • new hobby
  • new home

The easiest approach is to prematurely judge, declare failure and decide who to blame.  Failure is comforting.  The status quo is easy.

The new thing is never easy.  Creating something new is almost always uncomfortable.

When we judge too early, failure soon follows.

By the way, the cookies were amazing, but not until they came out of the oven.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Blame and Our Ego

Why do we play the blame game?

“If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.” –Jocko Willink

Here’s a thought experiment…

Looking back over the past few weeks (or months, or years), how many times did you blame:

  • someone
  • some thing
  • traffic
  • an injury
  • a disability
  • the weather
  • the economy
  • the government
  • your boss
  • your employee
  • social media
  • a company
  • a bad memory
  • anything but yourself?

No matter the subject, there are plenty of candidates for our blame…as long as we can aim it outward.

Our ego prefers blaming “the other” rather than accepting responsibility.  Life’s easier that way.

Blame doesn’t just apply to things that happened in the past.  Blame is most powerful (and crippling) when it prevents something from happening in the future:

  • I won’t be able to make it out there tomorrow. The traffic is just too crazy at that time.
  • I hate this job, but I don’t have time to learn a new trade.
  • I’d love to help you move, but with my bad back, I wouldn’t be very helpful.
  • There’s no way I’d ever start my own business in this economy. Besides, who needs all the government regulations and hassle?
  • It’s way too cold out there to go for a walk today.
  • I’d love to travel more, but there’s no way my boss would ever give me the time off.

How many times have you used blame to avoid doing something new, or something that could fail?

Blame is useful when it establishes a foundation for improvement.  When it represents a first step toward identifying root causes that can be solved.

Beyond that, blame has very little value, except stroking our ego (and keeping us nice and warm in our cacoon of status quo).

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Come on in, the water’s warm!

Back in the day, we used to grab our boogie boards and take the bus down to Seal Beach (in California).  It cost 25 cents each way.  Perfect for a budget-minded 6th grader and his buddies.

Side note:  nobody thought it was the least bit strange for a bunch of 6th and 7th graders to go to the beach on a public bus without their parents…my how times have changed in 40 years.

That first step into the waves was always the coldest.  It never failed that a wave would break right on shore, just as we were trying to slowly enter the water.

We always knew that the moment the water hit our stomachs, we might as well just dive in and swim out through the waves.

Within about thirty seconds, we were used to the water temperature.  We didn’t think about it for the rest of the day.  All we were thinking about was catching the next wave and buying a hot dog and a Coke for something like a dollar at lunch time.

We humans have an incredible ability to adapt.  Sure, we feel the shock of a new challenge deep in our gut at first.  We’ll wonder how in the world we’re going to deal with this new set of problems.  But, give us a little time, and we have what it takes to not only adapt, but to overcome.

The only question is whether we choose to adapt.

It’s our choice.

We decide whether we’ll dive into the cold waves and paddle out, or retreat to the warm safety of the beach.

The beach may be safe, but the waves we’re trying to catch are out in the water.

Time to dive in and start paddling.

Photo Credit:  That’s our grandson, Charlie.  He’s riding his first wave on a boogie board, at Beach 69 on the Big Island, a few weeks ago.  He turns 4 this weekend.  Cowabunga, Charlie!

 

Anything You Write…

What will you write today?

“Anything you write can be fixed, except for the pristine perfection of the blank page.” –Neil Gaiman

Our future is the ultimate blank page.  The cursor blinks patiently, endlessly.  Waiting for us to write something.

That cursor doesn’t care what we’ve written in the past.  It doesn’t really care what we’ll write in the future.  Still it blinks…waiting.

Writers sometimes talk about writer’s block.  The intimidating view of a blank page that beckons them to write something…anything.

I agree with Seth Godin, that there’s no such thing as writer’s block.  Rather, there’s fear that what I’m writing won’t be as perfect as I want it to be.  It won’t be accepted by my readers.  It may be shunned, castigated, or otherwise flamed by someone I don’t even know.

So, my lizard brain protects me by making sure I don’t write a thing.

The same is true in life.  What we write into our life today may not be perfect.  It may not make sense to anyone.  It may be wrong.

That’s okay.  As Mr. Gaiman says, we can fix it.

Today’s page will be written, whether we do the writing or not.

What will you write today?

 

Photo Credit:  Bob’s computer screen before and after writing this post

 

The Dodge

I’m often most productive when dodging the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

Here’s a paradox about productivity:

I’m often most productive when dodging the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

I always know when I’m avoiding a task, even if tell myself I’m not.  That task that seems undoable, requires multiple synchronized steps, requires difficult decisions, involves lots of other people who may not be “on board,” or the task with a nebulous benefit way out in the future.

It’s easy to dodge these challenging tasks and focus on the simple stuff.  That list of to-dos I can knock out in an afternoon.

I know I’m not doing the tough thing, but at least I’m being productive.  Nobody can accuse me of being lazy if I just keep moving.

This is the curse of staying busy, while not accomplishing anything.

I can dodge all I want.  I can tell myself stories to justify my delay.

It doesn’t matter, the tough task will still be there, waiting.

Here’s another paradox:

When I finally face the tough task, the one I’ve been avoiding, it usually starts to look a lot easier.  The next indicated steps begin to show themselves.  The unwieldy becomes doable.

The dodge makes the tough task appear bigger than it really is.

It comes down to fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of the difficult.  Fear of embarrassment.  Fear of failure.  Fear of success (yes, this is a thing).

What if this task is harder than I imagined?  What if it owns me?  What if I can’t do it?  What if someone sees me fail?

The answer to all these questions is, “So what.  Get started anyway.  Stop dodging and start doing.”

“Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.” – Seth Godin

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

 

 

 

Iteration is Everything

Iteration is the journey…

Iteration knows none of us know.

Iteration recognizes our first try isn’t our only try.

Iteration feeds innovation.

Iteration is fueled by our commitment.

Iteration is the only path to knowing.

Iteration overcomes our Resistance.

Iteration makes the mysterious familiar.

Iteration makes the impossible possible.

Iteration makes mistakes.

Iteration requires failure to find success.

Iteration sheds light on the darkness we fear.

Iteration is the journey to greater understanding.

Iteration always gives us another try.  The question is:  Do we have the courage to try again?

 

Photo by Tommy Lisbin on Unsplash

 

 

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Decisions are just ideas until we turn them into action…

Decisions always want more time.

Decisions always want more data.

Decisions always want more opinions.

 

Decisions don’t like risk.

Decisions don’t like being wrong.

Decisions don’t like upsetting people.

 

Decisions choose the path of least resistance, whenever allowed.

 

Decisions like being easy.

Decisions like being popular.

Decisions like being swayed by others.

 

Decisions like to follow.

Decisions like to blame someone.

Decisions like hiding behind distractions.

 

Decisions prefer urgency over importance.

Decisions prefer not to decide.

Decisions rarely see at a distance.

 

Decisions are just ideas until we turn them into action.  They’ll be difficult.  They’ll lack information.  They’ll often be wrong.

Decide anyway!

Each of us gets to make our own decisions…even when we choose not to decide.

All the rest are the stories we tell to justify the decisions we’ve made.

 

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash