I know this is true: because I have no fear of rejection, I have been able to do a lot more with my life than I would have done otherwise.
I’ve been rejected so many times, I’ve lost count. And you know what? None of those rejections killed me. Some of them hurt, badly, but none of them kept me down.
Rejection, that nasty, endless tape of “You can’t…”, “You aren’t good enough to…”, “Who are you to…” is worthless. It runs its mouth and there is no pleasing it. You can’t compromise with it. You can’t reason with it. You can’t take something good from it. It is rotten to the core. All you can do is shut it down.
Here’s the best outcome: you will do something you really want to do, gain confidence, be happy, and then work on your next dream. Awesome.
Here’s another possible outcome: you will pitch yourself into something and it will not work. You will fall down, you’ll perhaps sustain some bumps and bruises, and then you’ll get up. Big deal. You’re strong. You’ll become more resilient with each fall and rise. You’ll live to fight another day.
Here’s the worst possible outcome: you will let the spokesperson for the fear of rejection keep you from trying to do something you really want to do. And you’ll never do it. That’s just sad.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer is one of my favorite poets. I used to keep a poem of hers by my desk that asks the poignant question, “Do you like the company you keep in the empty moments?” She insightfully kind, a rare combination.
We have an incredible ability to endure, to persevere, to heal, and then to learn from that healing. No matter how the world bears down on us, no matter what obstacles encumber our path, we have everything we need at our core to rise to the occasion.
We are so much braver and so much stronger than we have ever give ourselves credit for being. And that strength and bravery is available to us at every moment. All we have to do is believe that it is there and it will appear.
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~ Carl Rogers
Are you thinking of quitting? Throwing in the towel on a dream you’ve worked hard to actualize? Great. You’re exactly where you need to be. You’re just about to have a break through.
Be a softie
There’s a lot of praise for people who persevere, who never show weakness, who remain tough and steadfast in the face of every obstacle. If we constantly put on a brave face, we miss out on an enormously valuable human experience. If we never break down, we never find out what we’re really made of. If we never fall, we never build the strength to get back up and try again. And that muscle of determination is hard-won and invaluable.
You have to give up to move ahead
I’m always inspired by the number of famous breakthroughs that have happened after a nap. In sleep, we surrender the conscious wielding of the mind. We literally let our imaginations run wild, no more barriers, no more little voice that says “oh that’s ridiculous.” In sleep, all possibilities are on the table. If anything is possible in sleep, then it’s no wonder that it’s the perfect breeding ground for breakthroughs.
Carl Rogers’ famous quote about change holds true in the land of imagination as much as it does in every day living. When we accept that we may not be able to crack a challenge that we’ve wrestled with for a long time, then the answer rises up. And that answer is usually so startlingly simple that we often berate ourselves for not seeing it sooner.
But here’s the rub: as we’re pursuing the answer, it’s also pursuing us. Challenges want to be met. Puzzles want to be solved. If we don’t stop, drop, and listen, then we risk chasing one another around forever. So if you’ve given it your all and tried to chase after an answer to no avail, go ahead and give up for a while. Get quiet. Let it go and let inspiration knock on the door when it’s good and ready. That way you’ll be rested enough to welcome it when it arrives.
I arrived at my community yoga class 30 minutes early. An older gentleman was waiting outside of the door. Seeing he walked with a cane, I wondered if he might be in the wrong place.
“Are you here for yoga?” I asked brightly.
“What else would I be here for? Are you the instructor? I’m Bob.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He just walked into the room. He reminded me of Mr. Fredricksen in the movie Up and I was about to be his Russell.
I went down the hall to the ladies room to change and began to panic. You may think yoga teachers are not allowed to panic because we are just supposed to let the teaching flow through us from the mystical universe. Think again. I’ve had an extraordinarily stressful couple of weeks, and my head had been throbbing since lunch. And now I had to figure out how to manage a class with a man who has a cane, and who I think may be triple my age?
“I can’t do this,” I sighed to myself in the mirror.
And then my usually tiny intuition strongly rose up out of my gut, “Stop whining and teach.”
My intuition has grown tired of my self-doubt. I listened. I picked up my bag and went down the hall to our classroom, chucking my entire plan for class right out the window.
My endlessly supportive friend, Tre, had arrived and another regular student would join us a few moments later. As Bob set up his mat I asked him if he had any health issues I should know about.
“None,” he said smiling. “I’m really healthy.”
“Are you sure, Bob?” I asked. “High blood pressure, high cholesterol?”
“Nope. I just want to do what everyone else in the class does.”
“I see you walk with a cane,” I said, letting my voice go up as if it were a question.
“Well, yeah, I had a hip replacement about 15 years ago. I’m probably due for another one soon. But at my age, 92, I can’t complain.”
92. 92? 92! Bob is certainly the oldest ambulatory student I’ve ever taught, particularly in a mixed level community class. For a time I taught on the Geriatric Psych floor at New York Methodist Hospital, but it was a chair yoga class, I had nurses and therapists to assist the patients, and most patients were quite far along their journey with dementia. Teaching with Bob, alongside healthy young women, was a new experience entirely.
I was nervous so I started asking questions to find a way in, to relate. We learned Bob was born in Brooklyn and has lived in New York City all his life except for his years in the Navy during World War II. He now lives just a few blocks away in a rent-controlled walk-up. His 94-year-old brother doesn’t do yoga – not hard enough for him – and goes to the YMCA 3 days a week to swim and bike.“He’s in even better physical shape than me,” he said with a bit of surprise in his voice.
I wish I could tell you I went on to give a brilliant class. I didn’t. I was nervous for Bob the whole time. I rarely give hands on adjustments in these community classes but Bob needed me and I had to be there for him. I struggled to figure out how to honor each of the students and their time in class, giving them the practice they each needed while taking care that Bob didn’t have something terrible happen to him while in my care.Additionally, I wanted to honor and respect Bob’s desire to be independent.
I take the health and protection of my students very seriously, and with this curve ball I found myself improvising all over the place. This place didn’t feel good. I was failing badly.
Towards the end of the class, and I mean the bitter end, I began to find my groove. Better late than never I guess. As we wrapped up and everyone got their belongings together, Bob gave us a tip of his hat as he walked out of the room, cane in hand.
“See you next time,” he called over his shoulder.
No one was more surprised than me. And maybe that’s the lesson I needed to learn from Bob – if you hang in there, especially when you feel yourself failing, and if you rise up and continually try to offer your very best, no matter how good or not good you think it may be, you’ll get through just fine. And you can bring others right along with you.
Lorelei and I at her Fall Festival. She got her face painted like a butterfly.
I spent the Thanksgiving holidays in Florida, and got a lot of time with my 4-year old niece, Lorelei. She likes to play the game I call “Touch the Ceiling” where she asks me to reach way up on my tip-toes and then jump to see if I can touch the ceiling. I’m 5’2″ and the ceilings in my niece’s house are at least 10 feet if not more. My vertical is decent but it’s not that good.
I laughed the first time she asked me to do that and told her that I couldn’t touch the ceiling because I was too short. “Well, you could always try,” she said to me. This back and forth happened multiple times over the holidays. Lorelei would ask me to do something like figure out how to fly up into the sky, put both feet behind my head, and open up a seemingly un-openable bottle cap. Each time I would say I didn’t think I could do it, and each time she would tell me I could try. And she was right – we have nothing to lose by trying.
After this exchange happened a few times, Lorelei got me thinking about all of the times I say to myself, “Oh, I just don’t think this is going to work.” And then I remember her wise and wonderful counsel – give it a go and maybe I’ll surprise myself. And what’s the worse that will happen? I won’t make it, and that’s okay, too. At least I gave it a shot. Failure isn’t as bad a we make it out to be.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this advice will serve me well in the new year. I hope it helps you, too.
(Thanks to Yoga Freedom’s prompt yesterday through Reverb11. The question “What lesson or piece of wisdom did you learn from a child this year? Did it surprise you?” inspired this post. And thanks to Jeffrey Davis for suggesting that I participate in Reverb11 through Yoga Freedom. So glad I took that advice!)
“This thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” ~ Mary Pickford (via Leslie Knope)
Network TV is my guilty pleasure. Anyone who says there’s nothing good on television isn’t looking hard enough. Last week I took in an episode of Parks and Recreation. Truthfully, I hated it the first few times I caught a piece of an episode. Then somehow the show found its legs and Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) stopped being a pathetic whiner and became brilliant without losing her quirks. She’s playing a caricature, but a caricature with humanity – something that’s difficult to do. She pulls out lines like the one by Mary Pickford at just the right time without making us feel like we’re being lectured by our parents. Every episode finds a genuine teachable moment.
The quote got me thinking about the necessity of runway that every new endeavor needs. NBC gave Parks and Recreation some room to find its groove. The Saint Louis Cardinals never gave up on the possibility of wining the World Series, even in mid-September when it looked all but impossible to pull that one out of the hat. At our last board meeting, I told the Compass Yoga board members that we should think about building out a second program because it appeared that we had contacted every veteran group in New York City and there were no more stones to turn over. The Board didn’t buy it. Their wise counsel: look harder. I did, and it turns out there are more stones. Stones that are actually boulders with a great deal of richness under them.
Even when all seems lost, even when it seems like we’ve run out of steam, inspiration, and opportunity, there is always more we can do. It takes extra ingenuity and some unconventional risk taking to find those additional options. Even when a way is not apparent, or even likely, we have to keep our will. We just never know when our luck will turn around.
We all stumble, fall, and make a mess. Life is not neat, orderly, or easy. However, there is a lot of good for us to do if we just keep at it. I don’t pretend to understand the magic of conviction and commitment. I just know it’s there. And I also know that if you get knocked down and stay down, then you’re denying yourself the opportunity to do truly great work and you’re cheating the rest of us who would benefit from it. Plus, it’s just plain sad and wasteful.
Take your punches and then stick your neck out again. It’s the only sure way to give yourself the best odds of succeeding.
Fear is a part of the process
This same idea was framed up by Sean Duffy in his Talent Zoo post entitled “Seven Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs”. Though the title seems a bit dull and run-of-the-mill, I read it anyway and I’m glad I did. The article is loaded with sobering advice for anyone considering a jump like mine like this: “The dictionary says that an entrepreneur is someone who starts and manages a business or other enterprise with considerable initiative and risk.” The risk, and the fear associated with it, cannot be extricated from the work of heading off on our own. Fear and risk are bound up in the very nature of the work itself. In other words, get used to it!
Sobering failure stat
But what if I fail? What if I hold my head up, look fear dead in the eye, and I don’t make it? Duffy lays out some statistics that first made me ill and then gave me hope:
A company’s chances of surviving its first five years in business = 20% A product’s chances of surviving past launch = 5% A company’s chances of ever reaching its long-term financial goals = 5% survival
This may be enough to cause us to throw in the towel before we even start. After all, the odds are steeply stacked against us, but there is some deeper meaning hidden in those numbers. These statistics actually helped me to set aside some of my fear. The great likelihood is that I will fail. It’s practically a given so there’s no sense in worrying about it. Whew – it’s kind of a relief to know this, isn’t it? If I do fail then I will be in good company. And still, I want to give it a whirl on the slight chance that maybe I’m stronger than the odds.
A one-sentence mission helps to release fear
I had coffee last weekend with my friend, Sara, who was in my yoga teacher training. She was also not having it with my decision tree abilities that are delaying my decisions about how to move forward in my career. “Didn’t you go to college and get all of these business skills to have something to fall back on?” I nodded. “Okay, then,” she said. “So try to do what you want. Talk yourself up!” I couldn’t refute that statement. She’s right.
I am a master planner but what I’ve done is plan my way right into plan B without even giving plan A a shot. With Sara’s prompting, I crystallized exactly what I want plan A to be in one sentence: “I want to buy into a holistic medical practice where I work with doctors and therapists to treat the whole patient.” From there, the fear started to dissipate not because I had successfully walled it off so I could walk peacefully around it, but because I just stood up and walked straight through it with my words. And in the process, it made my next steps clearer and more meaningful. Now, I have a concrete goal. (More on those steps in a later post.)
Fear takes a new form
I had been envisioning fear as this big, obnoxious monster whom I thought could be wrestled to the ground and contained. I imagined myself lassoing a big rope around its neck and tethering it to a tree so it couldn’t get to me. Fear is more slippery than that. There isn’t a way to keep it at a safe distance. It’s going to get us, and what really matters is how we face up to it when it is on our doorstep.
In my mind’s eye, I’m trying to put my fear in the form of Sully from Monsters, Inc., someone who looks very scary on the outside but on the inside isn’t so scary at all. I think of myself grabbing the furry hand of this fear monster and leading him along as we chart our course forward up over a grassy hill and on toward a brighter future, together. We can’t shake fear so we might as well befriend it and learn what it has to teach us.
This post is also available as a podcast on Cinch and iTunes.
“You must know that you can swim through every change of tide.” ~ Yogi Tea
This post follows on the heels of my posts encouraging you to focus, do worthy work, and take a risk. I didn’t learn to swim until I was 30, so I know how scary literal tide shifts can be. The tides of change – they’re even scarier. I will turn situations over and over in my mind, imagining every possible bad scenario that will be wrought by some change. In the past year, Brian and I have worked on my confidence, and that confidence building has largely come into play when the ground is shifting and the tides are churning. I’m so worried about getting swallowed up whole by change that I’m not giving enough credit to my ability to swim.
When a wave comes at us in the ocean, the worst thing to do is keep our heads up and fight it. Instead, diving in, and through, is the best thing to do. Waves of change are like this, too. Maybe the fear of change, particularly if you see it coming down the road at you, has you worried. It’s a change in a relationship, a job, where you live, or what makes you feel alive. Take comfort in the fact that you can swim through that change. It doesn’t have to barrel over you. You can go along and be taken to a place you never even dreamed of because you never knew of its possibility.
“Balance is not something you achieve and hold on to. It’s more ephemeral; it’s a string of temporary successes, held momentarily, lost, and then discovered again…it’s not permanent. When you lose it, you just have to have faith that you’ll come back to it.” ~ Carmel Wroth, Associate Editor for Yoga Journal
“Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process.” ~ President John F. Kennedy
“Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.” ~ Margaret Lee Runbeck, Time For Each Other
“Better to have lost at love than never to have loved at all.” ~ Poison
Well there’s a crew that you’ve likely never seen in a blog post before. All week I kept seeing a pattern of encouraging words about finding exactly what it is that we want, losing it, and heading out to find it again. Clear messages of impermanence coupled with the pep talk of “keep going.”
When we lose we think about giving up. We regret the effort and time and heart that our now-gone adventures required. The apparent waste lies heavy on our hearts because what we had, and loved, didn’t last. We’ve equated losing to mourning.
So let’s turn our losing on its head. When we lose our way, let’s think about the excitement of the search ahead and the joy we’ll feel again when we find our new path. If we find ourselves off-balance, let’s close our eyes, breath, and begin to balance again. Can we find just as much happiness in the search as we do in the find? Can we always make our way back to peace no matter how much anger we may feel? And when we separate from a long-time love, can we look forward to falling in love again?
It’s a tall order. Losing and then continuing to try takes a lot of heart and courage. Failure is a worthy opponent, but I will always believe that every failure is something we can rise above and be better for tomorrow. Don’t beat yourself up for losing. From time to time we’re all going to find ourselves there. What really matters is if you can stay in the game with an open mind and an open heart. Be a seeker.
The image above is not my own. It can be found here.
“Mistakes are not the “spice” of life. Mistakes are life. Mistakes are not to be tolerated. They are to be encouraged. (And, mostly, the bigger the better.)” ~ Tom Peters
How many adventures have been stopped in their tracks by the question, “What if I make a mistake?” How many dreams have died an untimely death? How many brilliant plans were left behind on the drawing board, never even getting a shot at the light of day? We hear so often that mistakes are our best teachers, that we learn more from failures than successes. So why don’t we celebrate mistakes? Why are we bent on telling people to always do what appears on the surface to be safe? Why does risk, any risk to any degree, have a negative connotation?
Here’s my advice on mistakes: start small with the aspiration to go big. I’d love to chuck caution to the wind, quit my job and do nothing but write and teach yoga. Truly, I’d wake up glowing every day, at least for the first week. And then I’d get nervous about money and I’d probably make some choices that compromise the work I really want to do with my yoga and my writing just to make ends meet. I’d likely save less, inhibiting my financial goals, and I wouldn’t be able to pay down my students loans as aggressively as I’d like to.
So my plan is to rent a small studio space once a week. The cash outlay isn’t much and I can rent week to week. I’m stepping up and out, taking some risk (mostly the potential of a very bruised ego if no one shows up to my class, which I can live with), and trying to strike out on my own in an authentic, meaningful way. I’m learning how to fly before jumping off the cliff. But don’t worry – I’m making my way to that cliff, and the moment I get a bit more confidence in my wings nothing will keep me from taking a running start right toward the edge.
Getting comfortable with risk, mistakes, and failure takes some time. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take things slow. Inch your way to your edge. It’s a step-wise process. Go slowly, but earnestly. Rather than aiming higher for the sake of bigger successes, I’m going to focus on upping the anty and aiming for bigger mistakes. Thanks to Tom Peters for always encouraging us to jump right into the fray – it’s more fun in the fray than out of the fringe.
Christa Avampato 