“Cages or wings…which do you prefer? Ask the birds.” -Jonathan Larson in Tick Tick Boom
Every once and a while, a piece of art comes along that moves my soul. The song “Louder than Words” from Tick Tick Boom is one of the more recent ones.1 Not to mention as an avid (but undercover) birdwatcher2, I’m a sucker for a bird metaphor.
The lyrics inspired me to build upon last week’s exploration of the paradox of optimism and objectivity.
Pessimism is often the result of “cages” that trap our mind. One of the most common cages that constrains optimism is the fear of failure.
How do we bust out of this “cage”? A simple answer is “be bolder.” In practice, that’s hard to do.
Instead, try thinking about it like an ironman athlete: To win an ironman race, it’s not about being the fastest, but about slowing down the least.3 To resist pessimism, it’s not about being the bravest, it is about giving into our fear of failure less.
Below are three practical tools to assist with having less fear of failure:
Fear setting
Fear of failure induces pessimism by holding us back from taking risks. It also can cause us to “lower the bar” for what we aim for. And while this “low bar” is often rewarded in organizational cultures (i.e. consistently achieving your goals by making them well within reach), most of the innovations and achievements that inspire us have been powered by optimism - a sense of belief in what is possible.
Tim Ferris, an investor, guinea pig and author, developed a practical tool call Fear setting. This tool is based on the stoic practice of “pre-meditation of evils.” The idea is to put your fears on the table, think through the worst-case scenario of those fears becoming reality and then put them in perspective relative to the cost of inaction. In nearly all cases, the worst-case scenario is easier to rebound from than we think and the cost of inaction is much higher than we think. The step-by-step approach to doing this is here and simple templates are here.
Re-framing beliefs
Most of our pessimism is self-inflicted. We manufacture stressful thoughts in our head that are difficult to unwind. In her book, The Work, Byron Katie offers a tool to examine and re-frame pessimistic thoughts. It involves four questions:
Is this statement/thought true?
Can you absolutely know that it is true?
How do you react (i.e., what happens) when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?
Jim Dethmer adds a fifth step called the “turnaround.” In this step, you take the original belief and re-frame it to be the opposite statement. The step-by-step approach for this tool is here.
Build a “bar raising” habit
Many of the practical tools I share focus on attention, because paying attention to new behaviors in a repeated and intense way helps re-wire our brain4. This one - the bar raising habit - requires 10 minutes total each day. Block five minutes at the beginning of the day and ask “what is one action I will take to raise the bar for me/my team today?” This could be as simple as pushing your team to finish the 12 month project in 10 months.
Then block five minutes at the end of the day and ask “how effective was I at raising the bar today?” Some days you’ll have victories. Other days you will not. And some days you will chicken out and not raise the bar.
If you stick with this daily practice over 13 weeks, the collective impact of these daily “bar raising” actions will be twofold: 1) you will have stretched your own belief in what is possible; and 2) you will get more insight on the areas where it is harder for you to have greater optimism. In those areas, you can go back to tools #1 and #2.
…
Each of these tools are arrows in the quiver that help us confront the fear of failure and ultimately, can help us bust out of the cage of pessimism.
Some questions I reflected on this week:
What is one area where fear of failure is holding me back?
To overcome this fear of failure, which of the tools above (choose one) do I want to experiment with?
How will I hold myself accountable for experimenting with this tool and taking action?
I have a playlist on Spotify called “Deep Feelings” with songs that inspire this kind of soul moving emotion. It includes a wide range of artists: John Legend, Lauryn Hill, Marc Anthony, Lin Manuel Miranda, Gloria Estefan, DMX, Kanye, Kendrick, Nipsey Hussle, Boys II Men, J. Cole, Five for Fighting, Alicia Keys, U2, Pedro Capo, Sam Cooke, Amy Winehouse, Madera Limpia, Jonathan Larsen, 2Pac, Lukas Graham, among others.
Red-tailed hawks (pictured above) are some of my favorite urban birds.
Credit goes to Rich Roll for sharing this framing of “not about being the fastest, but slowing down the least.”
More on this in the Friday Reflection on “Quarterly Tweaks.”