Fear Itself

Every once in a while there's that confluence of stuff that comes together in your life and you see things so much more clearly. It's a perfect storm of change.

And that happened for me this week.

First, I heard that writer Marianne Williamson is hosting a year-long audio class on The Course in Miracles on Oprah.com, so I clicked over and checked it out. This will tell you a lot about me -- the course is designed so that you listen to a daily message, then reflect and do exercises. You are to do one lesson daily. Only one, no more.

Of course, I listened to nine lessons the first day. Then skipped over to lesson 48. Then back to lesson 11. What can I say? I'm curious.

Then, the thoughtful, sensible writer-coach Cheryl Richardson recommended a movie called "You Can Heal Your Life", so I watched that online. The film, based on the work of Louise Hay, explores the power of thoughts. Like the course Marianne Williamson is teaching, the overarching idea is that your thoughts create your reality -- but your thoughts are not always based in what's happening now. They are often reactions to what's happened in the past.

I know all this stuff. See, I do personal development work for a living. All day, everyday, I challenge people to look at things in new ways and to try new things. And every assignment I ever give a client is something I've done myself. So, given all that, I was pretty confident (smug) of my own enlightenment.

At some point as the film rolled, I realized my jaw was hanging open and I hastily grabbed a pencil stub and the back side of someone's homework and began taking notes.

And as my mind exploded, I wrote these questions:

• What do I complain about most?
• When are things uncomfortable for me?
• What do I resent?
• Where is my thinking not helping me?

Great questions, huh? Willing to answer them yourself?

Because when you do, you will see something really important and useful.

The root of most of our unhappy thoughts is fear. Fear that we're not good enough. Fear that we won't have enough. Fear that we'll be abandoned. Fear that we'll literally or figuratively die.

When I looked at where my thinking was not helping me, I laughed out loud. Wanna know why? Next month I'm going on a trip with my kids. A trip which will require bathing suits and shorts. I absolutely convinced myself that due to a period of relative inactivity (hey! I hurt my ankle!) I am so fat that none of last year's summer clothes would possibly fit. In fact, it was likely I'd have to trade those size 10s for, oh, size 18s. If I dieted.

So, yesterday when no one was home but me, I took a deep breath and tried on last year's shorts. Amazingly, they fit. Like a little gopher popping out of her hole, I sat up and took notice. Feeling brave, I pulled the swimsuits out of their hiding place under an old bathrobe. In front of a full length mirror, ladies, I tried them on.

They fit, too.

It was only my thoughts about my body that had created an environment where I felt plain bad about myself. The reality was something much different.

And at the bottom of it was our old friend, fear. Fear of being flabby. Fear of being less than. Fear of not being good enough. Maybe fear of getting older. The sweet spot to explore is this: why was that fear working for me? Because it must have been working on some level, or I wouldn't have held on to it.

When you objectively look at your thoughts and completely understand where they come from, then and only then can you change them into something more inspiring, more embracing, more...true.

Who would you allow yourself to be if you had no fear? A nearly 48 year old woman in a bikini, perhaps? Hey, to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, all you have to fear is your thoughts, themselves.

What Is Love?

Nothing like a pop song to get to the heart of the matter. "What Is Love? (Baby Don't Hurt Me!)" may not have been the top of the charts, but it had a good beat and you could dance to it.

Is that what love is, though? Love is just not getting hurt? Certainly that's an implicit understanding in relationships -- but don't we also sing along with the equally catchy pop song with the chorus: "You only hurt the one you love"?

Many of you know that I am a big fan of the work of theologian Henri Nouwen. Recently I was reading his book Reaching Out. In it, Nouwen defines love as creating a safe place for another person to be fully themselves. What a thought! In this context, love is a gift you give with no promise of anything in return. And, no expectation of how a person must change to "win" your love. You remain an individual in a relationship, merely giving space to another individual in the same relationship.

Nouwen's idea becomes very clear to me when I think about the love between a parent and a child. If my job as a loving parent is to make a safe place for my child to be fully herself, then I have to hear her opinions, tolerate both her purple hair and her messy room if that's how my child expresses herself. This week.

In terms of romantic relationships, too, Nouwen's definition has heft. To truly love someone, it's imperative to let them be themselves. Not to ask them to change to meet your particular needs or your etched-in-stone expectations. If you have banked on marrying a guy with a fat wallet, are you really loving when you try to turn a poet into a corporate attorney? Or when you try to make a quiet, shy child into class president? Is that love?

If someone is destructive, reckless, negative or otherwise hurtful, the safest place for you might be to give the person an awful lot of room to be fully himself. Remember, our life's mission is not to change or save someone -- if their choices are destructive to us, we can lovingly step back and give them space.

In the seminal book The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm suggests that we are motivated by the anxiety caused by our inherent separateness as individualized human beings. Of course, this relates to our relationships with our mothers, as do most psychological theories. But don't get me started on that. And how mothers are systematically eliminated from nearly all Disney films. That's a whole other topic...

Back to the point. If our quest, as Fromm puts it, is to achieve union as a remedy to our anxious feelings of separateness, how do we find love as meaningful as in Nouwen's definition? How do we manage the twin drives toward individuality and separateness?

Sometimes, frankly, we don't manage them too well. For people who have unresolved issues around abandonment, or control, or separation from their parents, or personality disorders, or other blocks, the idea of being separate in an intimate relationship is scary and confusing. They may lack the tools to go within to resolve these problems, so they crave merger to salve their inner wounds. Aided by the popular culture which says, "Two Become One" (wasn't that a Spice Girls song?), some people find it truly difficult to remain an individual in an intimate relationship. Experts say that it's precisely this merger which threatens the health of our most intimate relationships.

So let's reframe what relationships are supposed to be, shall we? Dr. Michael Gurian, who wrote What Could He Be Thinking?: How a Man's Mind Really Works, is an expert on brain biology. Bottom line: men's brains and women's brains are constructed differently so we act differently. It may not be that the man hogs the remote because he's a self-centered jerk -- he may just be wired to be territorial. Women aren't weak and silly just because they like talking about stuff -- it may be just that she feels bonded when she does so.

If I make a safe place for you to be a guy, and you make a safe place for me to be a gal, what have we got? Dr. Gurian's theory of "Intimate Separateness" holds that there is a natural ebb and flow between the male brain's need for independence and the female brain's need for closeness. Merely understanding this nature-based fact can allow couples the freedom to be individuals and to move naturally between the two states -- distance and closeness -- without either being "right" or "wrong". This helps couples move away from destructive expectations of merger which can't be met anywhere except on the silver screen.

To love is to give. To love is to give a safe place for another person to be fully themselves. With no thought to what you're getting in return. It's a gift. It's so much more than romance. It's bigger than a crush. Yet, it's simply a gift. A gift that enlarges the lives of both the lover and the loved.

The $23 Billion Monkey

I was watching a hockey game the other day when I overhead a little girl ask her mother, "What happens if nobody wins?" And with a shrug, the mother answered, "Somebody always wins, honey." Which got me thinking.

A la Jerry Seinfeld, what's the deal with winning? There's always got to be a winner, whether in sports, politics -- even merging into traffic. Why does winning hold so much power for human beings? Especially humans of the dude variety. Ever notice that interest in professional sports rose as the opportunities for men to go to war decreased? I'm just sayin'...

Winning is held in such esteem that a tie, where there is no clear victor, leads to "sudden death." As in, the battlefield death of the vanquished. Would it be different if we called the tie-breaking overtime outcome "sudden victory"? Feels much less satisfying, no?

Earlier in the week I spoke with a man who is considering starting his own business in an industry he knows extremely well. We discussed the competitive landscape and he noted that the industry leader is known for cut-throat tactics and a lack of integrity. "I don't want my company to be like that," he said. "But, can I be successful if I'm not number one?"

Author and tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore says you can, if you're smart. He says there are three different kinds of players in a competitive market: Gorillas, Chimps and Monkeys.

Gorillas are the segment leaders, whose products become the industry standard. Think Coca-Cola. Chimps are the challengers -- think Pepsi. And Monkeys are the guys who follow along in the market, aping the Gorillas and Chimps, often positioning themselves as unique or offering excellent customer service to get business. Think Cadbury-Schweppes.

In business as in sports, we think we have to be a Gorilla to be successful. But monkeys can make great businesses. Sure, Coke's market cap is nearly $137 billion, but Schweppes? There are plenty of bubbles in ginger ale, friends -- $23 BILLION worth of bubbles.

And you can't tell me that ain't a successful business.

"Winning's not everything, it's the only thing," said legendary coach Vince Lombardi. Uh huh. Guess it depends on how you define winning. Because being Number Three, the $23 billion dollar Monkey, can be extremely satisfying. Considering the energy needed to maintain Gorilla status, being a Monkey -- doing what you love and doing it well, sounds pretty appealing.

Pressuring yourself to always be the winner can lead to incredible stress. And, as the New England Patriots proved, nobody wins all the time. Some of the best learning I ever had, in fact, was working on a losing Presidential campaign. Sure, winning would have been great -- but I learned how to handle defeat somewhat gracefully. I learned about what works, and what doesn't, in campaigns. I learned about loyalty, and friendship. I learned just how far I can be pushed, physically, emotionally and mentally. I learned about what's really important.

Which is worth the market capitalization of Coca-Cola to me.

The next time you find yourself driving yourself (or your kids, or your work group, or your spouse) to be the Gorilla, ask yourself this: Is winning worth being completely stressed out? What's to be learned from doing my absolute best, even if I'm not the Gorilla? Can I be content with being a very successful, centered, happy Monkey?

I say: pass the bananas, baby, 'cuz the world needs more happy monkeys.

Saying Goodbye

It's hard to say goodbye. As Shakespeare so aptly put it, "Parting is such sweet sorrow." And in this life there is much to be parted from, often with much grief.

One man becomes suddenly, critically ill and must part with the idea of his youth and vigor.

One young mother loses her own mother, and must part with the idea of herself as someone's beloved child.

One man parts with his wedding ring after his wife's death, and lets go of the idea of himself as someone's husband.

One woman parts with her home and possessions and adjusts to the idea that she won't live independently for the rest of her life.

I've written about crisis and how it can change lives. Crisis forces a redefinition of who we are, and what's important to us. Altering those fundamental views about ourselves is, no surprise, life changing.

Catalytic crisis requires us to move from the cocoon of "known-self" to "unknown-self". Embracing the unknown is not something many of us handle particularly well... so, in the alternative, we cling fearfully, ferociously to our known-self.

Known-self may have worked for years. We're comfortable with all the rules in known-self -- and we can anticipate with confidence how we and others will act. Even if we know we're unhappy in our known-self, at least we know what to expect! Who wants to upset the apple cart? But when clinging to known-self feels like pain, you will change it. Sometimes it seems it takes a crisis to show us just how ill-fitting known-self has become.

The prospect of unknown-self is murky, and for those with control issues, it's precisely the unknowing that's so hard. Parting with a definition that really doesn't work should be, on its face, easy to do. However, parting with the known in favor of the unknown -- that seems scary. It's like emerging from the cocoon we've constructed as a worm and learning to live as a butterfly. None of the old rules seem to apply.

So, in those moments, remember: "parting is such sweet sorrow."

When you say goodbye to something old that no longer fits, you open space for something new. It's the opportunity for "new-self". Which could be something nicer, better, happier. Could be something that helps you live more fully. Could be something sweet.

Be open to the opportunity for change that life brings. Welcome it. Because it's your chance to flap your butterfly wings... and fly.