Elusive Illusions

Last year I made a commitment to Try New Things. I even named my Twitter account Try New Things! So 18 months later...did I try new things? Yes and no. At first I would make sure to try something new every day. I would plan a new thing to do every day. A new recipe, a new wine, a new route to work, a new sport. The goal was to shake up my world a little and change the way I saw that world.

Then life got in way and at the end of each day I would look back and review the day hoping I could find one thing new that I did that day. Then I would rationalize small events to suggest that I had done them differently and therefore I had done something new. The task of explaining it all to myself became the exercise. Instead of the renewed excitement I experienced when I actually did do something new.

Starting the business became a huge challenge and every step of the way I was trying something new. Bringing the product in from China was one challenge after another and although I enjoyed the learning, I was in over my head and I could not truly feel that simple joy of trying new things. Now we are learning new software, working with the hand collating plant and learning how to work with a new sales force. So every day there really is something new to learn and we learn as we go. It turns out there are many people who are willing to help or offer expertise just when I think I have reached an impasse. And so we move forward every day. Brian Tracy says that persistence is when you keep going after the shine of the new idea wears off. This is definitely that.

So maybe I am trying new things every day. They are small one foot in front of the other steps towards creating and selling the product. A friend told me I was one of the 10 most amazing people she knows. I am humbled by that compliment. I am ordinary but mighty. She made me stand a little taller. I saw myself in a different light. The light of an observer who does not see the anxieties and fears of my undertaking. It makes me realize that it is true that those who do, do so despite their fears.

The samples arrived from China today and I was struck by just how amazing it looked. For a moment I was back in the shiny new idea place. It reinforced the idea in my mind and let me see the big picture again.

Click on the image to watch the illusion!

Try New Things

It is interesting that when we try new things it encourages us to try more new things. It gains a momentum all it's own. That first step out of the inertia of your comfort zone/anti-anxiety zone is the one that seems the hardest to take. Schedule it. Define it. Then do it at the specified time. I am going to do ____ (small goal) by _____ .(date)It is that simple.

I had fallen off my fitness schedule. In all his innocence my teenage son said why don't you just go to the gym. Hmmmmm. My mind was full of reasons but none of them strong enough to counter my son's inadvertent wisdom. I said to him I will go tomorrow and he said tomorrow you will have this social event(he named it) get in the way. You want to be strong for the summer he said. He is right on all counts. I went to the gym.

The first step behind you. The next one invites you. Now that you are out of your comfort zone that second step seems not as hard as the first. Your comfort zone has readjusted it's perimeter to become a larger circle. The first step accomplished invigorates you to look for step two. To set the second day and make it happen. Day by day your small achievements sum to an increasingly larger achievement. When you are successful it breeds a confidence that encourages you to push your limits in other areas of you life. Yesterday I blogged about achieving a state of happy because you are growing. Whenever you are melancholy choose a growth goal and take one step on the path to that goal. Define the second step and take it and pretty soon you are loping along a new and intriguing path towards a new you.

Every day I try something new. A new item in an old restaurant, a new wine from a new country, a new newspaper instead of my regular one, a new path on my regular running route. I talk to someone I would have never spoken to in my normal place. I download a new app and give it a try. A new shop that I have never been to. A book by an author I have never read. Once a month I try something bigger. I go to a wall climbing gym and take a quick lesson and climb the wall. I get the local college or recreation listings and take a course in an area that has interest to me. I read an old classic novel. I try a new foreign looking piece of equipment at the gym. I intuitively steer clear of the pieces of eqipment I do not know for fear of looking silly as I learn. Trying new equipment at the gym is another great analogy for life. Intermittent failure and looking silly are the price of growth.

The new experience creates an aha moment where we experience the world differently. Our sense of adventure, that fades as we age, needs to be rejuvenated. One new thing every day. As we try on new things our sense of adventure returns and those new things get bigger in scope. So does your comfort zone.

Credit where credit is due. Click on the picture to read the poem. It will inspire you and make you realize that you are not alone. This amazing poem was written by http://www.voiceoveruniverse.com/notes/Comfort_Zone Go to his blog.

Happiness

William Butler Yeats wrote that "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." This is one of those succinct moments when you read or hear a thing and it pulls all the pieces of your puzzle into a full picture. How a simple phrase can reignite your passion. It makes me understand why despite having all that I have that I still feel like I am searching. It also reveals that happiness is not a point in time but instead is an everchanging state of being. It unwinds the complexity of the search for happiness. In all the times when I am least satisfied I can see that those are the times of the least growth.

Imagine all the different areas in which we can experience growth. We do not grow in all areas at the same time. A friend of mine, a single mom just moved in with her long time boyfriend. She is growing in the area of relatonships. Another friend watches her second child go off to University and needs to develop a new agenda. She is growing to define what pleases her now. She is developing a new agenda for her life. Another friend has started a business and left her job behind. She is growing in the emotional parts of her inner self that encourage self reliance and confidence. In all these instances, the early chaos gives way to a peaceful retrospective of what has occurred and how we have grown. It is only in glancing back that we can see that the chaos and emotion was a necessary prerequisite to this new plateau.

We do not need to grow in all areas at once. One area is enough. Two can be stimulating. When we grow in many areas at the same time the chaos is overwhelming. Sometimes life events force change. Then we grow in many ways at the same time. The unbearable tumult gives way to a new day with new skills and new strengths haphazardly acquired but valuable nonetheless.

Real life is a tennis volley back and forth between the search for safety and our need to grow. When we settle into our safe place our dissatisfactions gradually rise to where we break out in one area of our lives and seek growth. Small puddle jumps let us try on change but do not induce the heart pounding chaos that inspires true growth. The real growth comes when we abandon our safety net and leap across the unknown abyss. The abyss jumping extreme sport is not for the faint of heart!

At other times we retreat into the no growth zone and wallow in a melancholy from which we cannot break free. We fall into a place where we are recognizably dissatisfied but not confident enough to catapult ourselves into change. It is a strange unhappy place, safe because of it's familiarity but dangerous for the very same reasons.

When you risk your safe place for new growth you create a happiness quotient that far exceeds the inputs. Not ground breaking to repeat that we need growth to be happy but the reminder can shake you out of your safe place and encourage you to try something new. So long ago spoken, Yeats words still live. How profound.

Sporting Life 10 km

I ran a 10km run down Yonge Street in Toronto this morning. Both my teenage sons joined me. It is a regular annual event that we run every spring and it always challenges me. I love it because it is a family event that we share amidst the madness of running around pursuing our own schedules. I love to share the event with my boys and their different friends who choose to join us each year.

A friend and her boys run it with us and it was interesting to see that over the years she and I help each other along. She was not strong this year and I found it interesting that I missed her strength moving me forward, but found my own strength to finish with a respectable time. It was an interesting analogy to real life as some years she is leading and encouraging and other years I am. Just depends on who is at a point of strength at that time. I waited for her to cross the finish line. My time did not matter. We are a team. It is what women do.

I looked around at all the people...I think there were 14,000 runners. All shapes and sizes and ages. All running for their own reasons. There was a man lying on the road at the 7km mark and they were doing CPR on him and I teared up at the thought of his family waiting at the finish line. I was struck by the fragility of being human. It made me look at all the runners with a new appreciation. It made me appreciate the strength of my own physical self. Life is fragile. I want to wake up every day and feel my power and my peace.

I want to enjoy this physical shell that is so intricately connected to the spirit that resides in it. How great it feels to push beyond my limits! How it feeds my body and mind to do that. It makes you accept your human-ness with all it's flaws and limitations and appreciate the strengths that have been dealt to you. Thank you Sporting Life!

Awfulizing

Psychology Today has penned a beautiful version of how we deal with change and more so how we deal with thinking about change. I have copied and footnoted two excerpts below because they capture the spirit of the article. To get the full impact, and the article is definitely worth reading in it's entirety, go to http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200611/you-20

In the excerpts below Carlin Flora outlines the two items that stop us in our tracks when we attempt to change. The first is our fear of failure and the second is how terrifying stepping out in new directions can actually be. My children as teens do not have these fears. It would be interesting to know the circumstances under which I acquired these fears although I suspect that they came about so gradually as not to be noticed.

"Overcome Your Fear of Failure

You could quit your banking job and open an antiques shop or move to Romania to live with your online love. But what if it doesn't work out? What will everyone say about you then? The fear of public humiliation can keep us safe, if not content. Simply ask, "What is the likelihood that the thing I fear will come true?" says Lubetkin. And then, "If it does come true, will it really be as bad as I think?" Our minds tend to cue the worst-case scenario, what psychologists call "awfulizing." But even shaky startups and broken hearts can be remedied.

Those who would judge you may not even notice your missteps. If they do, they would be smart to think your behaviors—and not you as a human being—are what failed. Temporary slips are crucial to eventual success, Leahy says. "When I was an undergraduate, a classmate of mine got a C on a paper in his economics course about an idea for an overnight mail service. Two years after college, he took that blueprint and started FedEx."

Embrace Risk and Novelty

Even if no one is watching you, lighting out for new, unmarked territories is terrifying. We overestimate dangers and risks, Lubetkin says, because oftentimes our parents—especially if they are overprotective—teach us that danger is to be avoided at all costs.

Pelusi sees a distal cause for skittishness in the face of change. "We impute a lot of power to the unknown, because it was life-threatening for much of human history," he says. "Putting that fear in its proper perspective can help. You are probably not going to fall down a ravine or get eaten by a lion if you move to the opposite coast."

At the same time, points out Pelusi, the human spirit wants to break out of habitual constraints. Studies confirm what many an entrepreneur or divorcee will tell you: We tend to regret the things we didn't try more than those we did—even when we fail.

Analyzing risk in the classic "Should I stay or should I go?" scenario can bring on headaches or even paralysis. Lubetkin recommends that you write down the pros and cons of each situation and then weight them numerically, according to how important they are to you. But then you must also factor in the more subjective "gut" feelings. Flip a coin in order to hypothetically decide your fate, then take note of how you react to the outcome. "

How succinct. I needed to capture that to reread in my times of discontent.

Small Acts

It is interesting that as I work on the details for the business, they make me feel like I am a very small business labouring in anonymity from my kitchen island. The small actions make me feel like the business is small. I have 14 reps selling across Canada now. I have 60,000 units arriving in from China in 6 weeks. I have a sales manager who works for the company and loves what she does. Things are not small anymore.

So when I look at many larger companies, their business too, is also made up of endless small actions made by many people. Hotel chains are made up of many people at all levels doing many small actions that build to the functioning of a whole huge hotel chain. Apple Computers is a large group of people doing many small actions each day. So my small actions build to the whole and that is what I need to stay focused on. Each of those small activities in my day builds to the success of the whole. It makes every act important.

Sometimes when you feel uninspired it is rooted in one of two opposing thoughts. The first is that the things you are doing are small and insignificant to the whole big goal. The second is the intimidation of just how big the goal looks when you look at it in it's entirety and say "I'll never get there". The solution to either is just to take action. When you're feeling stuck just remind yourself to take action, any action even on the small stuff. Action begets action and pretty soon you are rolling along again. Many small tasks building to the big result.

Nobody starts out big. Everybody starts with all those seemingly insignificant actions that build momentum and help you to become what you are becoming.

Dreams and Reality

I miss the dreamy time where I would invent a product in all it's glory and detail. It is, in retrospect, the easy part. The easy part is that glorious research where you dream up the product and what it looks like. In my case, it was fun to work through the different themes for the trivia lines and determine the questions that would appeal most to my future customer.

And here I am, product available, dreams in the rear view mirror. I am working through all the little details that constitute the road to having a thriving line. These are the realities and they are a stark contrast to the dream. I still have the dream intact in my mind but it requires distinctly hard work to achieve it. It is the part that any budding entrepreneur does not think about when forming the dream. It is the artist who has decided to sell their artwork. It is the consultant with a great message who has to let the world know about it. It is the professional who returns to school to train for their new dream and now has to write exams. It is the product developer who must find a channel for distributing their product.

JFK dreamed of putting a man on the moon. He had people to take care of the actual execution of the dream. He drove it but others filled in the details.

The detail part is not a bad thing. Just distinctly different than the dream phase. Practical. Perplexing. Painfully incremental. Factual. Expensive. Risky. Exhiliarating at the same time!