2 to 4 Tips for Handling Fear of Failure or Success: Plus the Lipizzaner Leap

I realized I have more to say about fear of failure or success or whatever it is I fear. Whether it’s fear of failure or fear of success I am dealing with - or you, Readers, are dealing with - there is a strategy  to help you cope. I think of it as dads' words of wisdom. That's "dads" plural, because I'm thinking of   my father-in-law (FIL), who once said to me, “This too shall pass.” This was in response to my unmitigated despair over some annoying toddler phase of my firstborn child. "This too shall pass" is not only a saying, it's also a cliché. These clichéd sayings slip by you unnoticed, or they did me, until at some point, all at once, they seemed to have real meaning. For instance, when my FIL said that, it struck with the full force of its meaning. Cuz you know clichés, they have a grain of truth - that old cliché. Well, all of a sudden, sproing! there was the truth, and it was less of a grain and more of a diamond. This, too, shall pass. God, was that comforting. 

So apply that one to your situation, if you’re afraid of failure. If you’re waiting for something to happen, like an editor to buy your proposal, apply it like a salve to your vivid imaginings of failure: there you are - failed - again - at some unspecified time in the future. You are humiliated, depressed, despairing. But it will pass. It shall pass. Therefore, be not afraid.

Don't like that one? Well how ‘bout this dad-ism: You’re putting the cart before the horse. This saying I attribute to my dad. It might be useful applied to fear of success. Now, I can’t actually recall a situation in which my dad said this, but he implied it often. It’s one of those, “Whoa, whoa, slow down kid, don’t get carried away with any great expectations” kind of statements, which I think he did make. Too many times, actually. But whatever. That’s why there is therapy. But my point, Readers, is that in this situation of waiting, fearing failure or success or whatever it is you might be fearing, remember that you are thinking about something that hasn’t happened. You haven’t yet succeeded. Nor, as in the previous worrying scenario, have you yet failed. You are simply putting the cart before the horse, which is stupid and will get you nowhere. Although if the horse is smart, she’ll make a Lipizzaner side-step and get the heck out of there. But that’s another story, about horses, not about carts and worries. 

Now’s the time to get all philosophical. If I’m not supposed to put the cart before the horse, and I’m supposed to remember that this, too, shall pass, how do I spend my time while waiting? My philosophy skews Buddhist, but I’m not going to tell you to meditate. No, this bit of advice is straight out of Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.  Here’s the trick.  “Shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Live in Day-tight compartments.”  He says this right in chapter one.

Live in day-tight compartments. That’s self-explanatory, don’t you think? Focus on today, now, not what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. 

But I will go on. Because I think that living in day-tight compartments is easier said than done (cliche). What if, like me, you manage to shut a few worries in with you in your day-tight compartment? And they're buzzing around you like bees at a picnic? Well, be like Heraclitus and remember that you never step in the same river twice. Every moment is different. Remember this too shall pass, do not put that cart before that horse, and - remember that this is the only moment over which you have any control. So focus on this moment. This moment. Oops. That moment is now gone. Focus on this moment. The present moment. Over and over and over again. What are you doing right in this present moment? That is all that matters. The rest takes care of itself. 

So, once again, I believe I have touched on fear and anxiety and worry once or twice on this blog, and at least several times in this single post. But that is okay. I'm okay, and you're okay. I also think I've offered three tips for handling fear of failure, success, or life in general so far. And I'm not finished! More tips ahead!

Let's get back to that side-stepping Lipizzaner for a second. If the iron clad, day-tight compartments and the dad-isms don’t work for you, try side-stepping your worry. Distract yourself. Do something that keeps you busy and preoccupied and stops you from thinking about your worry. Write a blog post on a worry related to your worry, but less worrisome to discuss than your actual worry. This may or may not be a strategy I'm employing RIGHT NOW. 

Ahem. College. Daughter. Applications. Future. 

Now, in case you’re concerned about my worrying, Readers, do not be. I am now fully embracing my inner (and outer) worrier because the fact of my worrying proves I am a creative genius. According to this article: http://higherperspectives.com/overthinking/  

Okay, “proves” might be too strong a word. “Suggests” or “indicates” or “correlates with the possibility” or “somewhat points towards the possibility that” I am a creative genius. So that’s something, right? We'll get to that another day. I've been reading a lot about creativity of late. Meantime, here are some pretty, distracting horses:

Success and the Inner Rabbit

November is over. NaNoWriMo is over. And apparently, so is my writing habit. I know, say it isn’t so. Well, look, I accomplished the goal of writing 50K words of a first draft in November. Fifty thousand words - and some. I wrote at least 1,667 words every day but one. (1,667 X 30=50,000). It felt great. And then December hit. 

What happened? I thought I’d developed my habit. A habit takes about twenty-one days to establish. The daily words didn’t even take all that long, since what I was writing mostly was drivel. I say that without having looked back over my work, yet; but I am sure most of it is drivel. And I haven’t finished my draft. Therefore, I need to produce more drivel. I can work with drivel. Drivel I can revise. But now that the companionship of the other 300,000 people who signed up for NaNoWriMo has dwindled, my writing habit has gone pffffft. Part of it has to do with the busy season. The children have started all their end of semester performances. There are all kinds of things that end up sliding into the work week hours, therefore, because the weekends are taken up with rehearsals and performances. Also, the husband is on call right now, which means interrupted sleep on top of perimenopausal interrupted sleep.

But these are excuses. The real reason is that fear has slowed me down. Once the artificial deadline and word count goal of November 30^th passed, my structure disappeared. November was squeezing through a narrow passageway that took all my focus to inch through, doubts and fears about my eventual accomplishment notwithstanding; and then December was

One of many distractions....

coming out the other side of the passage into a vast open space. I’m like a little rabbit, paralyzed by the shadow of a predator overhead.

I’m not sure, in this analogy, what the overhead predator stands for in my life; but you get the idea, Readers, don’t you? My point is the wide open spaces and the blinding light are too much for my Inner Rabbit. The answer seems to be to dart hither and yon until I can create another tunnel-like situation for myself, a place to burrow and write that squeezes the self doubt and fears, if not out entirely, because frankly that seems impossible, to the side.

The question becomes, then, how to do that? Recently, I read a book called Saved, by Ben Hewitt, a journalist who spent a year hanging out with a friend of his who lives off the grid. The financial crisis of 2008 awakened in him the realization that he didn’t know anything about money. So he wanted to follow around this happy go lucky dude who had almost zero of the filthy stuff. Anyway, my takeaway from Ben’s experience was a new understanding of the phrase, “Time is money.” When he looked closely at his friend Eric, bartering for whatever he couldn’t do or get for himself, he saw a free person. Free because he chose what was important enough for him to spend his time - his days, his hours, his minutes doing. Most of those things had nothing to do with earning money. There were many, many ways he could spend his hours and end up earning money; but they weren’t worth the trade off to Eric. Hanging out with Eric, Ben began to think about how many hours it would take of money-earning work to afford, for example, a new car, and began to consider whether that trade was worth making. Because, how you spend your time is how you live. It’s how you pass your life. Maybe a used car would be better. Or a bike.

Whatever we need to do to get that sense of urgency, maybe we should do it. Maybe it’s procrastination. I know, that sounds just plain contrary. But maybe scrunching up against a deadline is the best way to produce a result. I don’t really think so, actually, and I just read somebody’s article about realizing how procrastination was damaging her career because she never produced her best work, just work that met the deadline.

So what would be best would be to have that understanding of life being finite all the time, so you can make sure you focus. That sounds awful, just like those lifeline timers you can download to your desktop that tell you how much longer you have to live. Yikes.

I’m conflating two needs here. (I’m allowed to do that. It’s my blog.) There’s the need to accomplish stuff. Stuff seems to get done best with a sense of urgency, a looming deadline breathing down the neck. I can just hear my former housemate from East Germany ridiculing my very American emphasis on progress and producing. Is it possible not to have a need to accomplish at least something?

The other need is to appreciate the value of life. This could actually lead to ignoring deadlines altogether and channeling one’s inner Ferdinand. Smelling the flowers, being in the moment, or – of this my former housemate from East Germany would approve – drinking beer and having involved conversations with friends about appreciating the value of life. Appreciating the value of life, unfortunately, often requires a shock involving realization of mortality. The beautiful mundane never seems so beautiful as when you wake up after surgery, for example, and discover you are still here.

Good thing I don’t like beer. Because if there’s one thing that sidelines my drive to accomplish stuff, it’s fear. Which brings me back where I started. I do want to finish my sh**ty first draft. So I will simply have to find another tunnel.

TMI? The Tao of Worry

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Readers, I am obsessing about my left breast. I feel nothing different in it. It doesn’t hurt. And yet, in the past, I have had pain there, and a few months ago, I had a pulled muscle basically right underneath it. I spent so much time poking around the area that I bruised myself. Right now, nothing is going on. Yet I feel like I feel something, in the sense of sensing something. I feel like I sense something there. A thickness. A weirdness. Which reminds me of two things. One is this story about the sister of a friend who went to the doctor complaining that her breast hurt, “Right here.” She said, jabbing at the spot. The doctor said, “have you been doing that a lot?” “What this?” She said, jabbing at the spot. “Yes.” Said the doctor. “Yes,” she said. The doctor said, “Stop doing that.”

The other thing I'm reminded of is the homeopath I visited for a while in hopes of curing my chronic exercise-induced urticaria. (That’s hives, for the uninitiated.) I was also having problems breast feeding my kid with my LEFT breast. After taking my medical history she pointed out that  I have issues on the left side of my body. Left ovary removed. Mastitis in left breast. Then she gave me a little bottle of something. It didn’t cure the hives. Years later, acupuncture alleviated them - and also led to the discovery of the lipoma (fatty benign tumor) on my left shoulderblade. Left, left left.

So the explanation of why I’m obsessing about my left breast may be that because I have a history of things going wrong on the left side of my body, when I start to worry about things going wrong, I tend towards the left (sinistra in Latin - root of sinister, if you think about it) side.

Good thing I’m going for my annual mammogram on Monday. After which, the husband asked, will I be able to relax about my boob for a while? Yeah, probably for about a month. Realistically.

Of course, maybe the mammogram will reveal something wrong, and then I’ll have the very shallow pleasure of knowing that I was right. Except that I’ve spent a portion of pretty much every day worrying about cancer, so eventually, I may be right, no matter what. Lately, I’ve added cardiac concerns to my worry list. Not that I have heart trouble – at least not that anyone’s discovered. That's precisely the point. No one has discovered any problem. Yet anything could develop at any moment. And it’s the stuff you don’t know about that will get you. It happened to a couple of friends of mine. Of course they are still alive and healthy. But they are living with the knowledge that there’s something wrong with their hearts.

The real question, though, is why the worry in the first place?

Aren’t we all living with the knowledge that there could be something wrong? Indeed, isn’t there something wrong with all of our hearts? Hello? They are eventually going to stop working. We are going to die. That is what is wrong. That is why the worry.

Here are two pieces of advice I've been given by Professionals for dealing with worry:

1. Set aside a certain amount of time every day to worry, and then don't worry until that time.
2.  Or, worry once and worry well. 

This advice doesn't work for me. I cannot "worry once," and the time of day I set aside to worry is usually 3-5 a.m., which is kind of a drag.

I’ve concluded that I need to think about death. “Come to terms with death,” as some might say. Perhaps all you Readers  have come to terms with death and live worry-free lives of great empowerment and fulfillment. If so, please share.

I find it interesting that my worries increase as things get better in other areas of my life. For example, I have paying work. I recently got a raise. I’ve had some success with my blog. My kids and husband are healthy, and I have friends. So the question is, do I have some kind of homeostatic mechanism at work trying to keep me at emotional equilibrium? You know, don’t fly too high, don’t dip too low?  Is it a self-protective system to remind me to balance my life and pay attention to my physical health so I can continue? Is some kind of tao of worry at work? 

Or is it a pathological set up, a self-sabotage that keeps me from fully expressing whatever it is in me to express? The time I spend in useless, pointless worry about illnesses I don’t have, is time spent not doing things that are useful. And it's not as if it's protective. 

How to remove the anxiety? Besides medication, I mean. Perhaps, Readers, you are thinking that I am an excellent candidate for some kind of pill. Perhaps you are right. But I prefer not to take pills. I prefer  to manage my anxiety in other ways. This attitude, I understand, is one symptom of the anxious person. Or one symptom of one kind of anxious person. My kind.

But I digress. The idea is to Come to Terms with Death. Is that even possible? Have you, Readers? I know that Tibetan Buddhist monks sometimes meditate in graveyards and charnel houses to accustom themselves to the idea. And there is a nifty mantra – sutra – on impermanence:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become ill. I cannot escape illness.
I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 

It’s just not that appealing to meditate on these ideas. Yet, remembering that these processes – illness, old age (if you’re lucky), and death – are part of everyone’s parcel does relieve some anxiety. If you’re like me, you get into the mindset that everything in life is supposed to have a certain baseline: things are good, people are healthy, jobs are there, work is productive. So anytime something dips below baseline, there's a sense that there’s something wrong, abnormal, and let’s face it, kind of shameful. So it’s good to remember that there isn’t really a baseline, and that there’s nothing shameful about experiencing these natural processes of life.

All this blather reminds me of a high school weekend party I attended. I had a “deep” teenaged conversation about death with a person I won't name, because he was somebody’s boyfriend. Also because this is a blog, and I don't name names. But I apparently can't resist bragging about this boy obliquely. One of us was angsting about it (death) –guess who? The other one, he said he didn’t worry about death, because when he was dead, he wouldn’t care. And I found that so comforting. I had this moment of total release. It was so simple. Just letting go of the problem. It would come, life would be over, but it wouldn’t matter. Then he kissed me. 

Linking sex and death. Gee, has that ever happened before? Is there any literature on that? Well, anyway, it's a much more pleasant connection than I started with. Although mentioning sex does remind me of my left breast....

Form Your Success?

The library didn't have Deepak Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, so I browsed the shelf where it would have been and came across my latest instruction manual,  The Secret Code of Success: 7 Hidden Steps to More Wealth and Happiness, by Noah St. John. It's one I hadn't heard of, but I took it anyway. The cover was new and shiny, and it brought me into the 21st Century.

Overall, let me say, it's a very easy read. Lots of short sentences. Colloquialisms. Bolded words. Much space around paragraphs, and a few charts with titles like The Scales of Success and The Iceberg of Consciousness. 

The first third of the book explains why typical "shelf-help" books fail us, my tens of readers. They tell us to set a goal, to think positively, to say affirmations, to act on our goals, and if we fail, to try again. All these steps, according to St.John, are behavior-based, and are therefore doomed. The problem? While we may consciously want to change something, our subconscious is much harder to convince. Our subconscious holds us back, because it contains all kinds of fears or reasons or beliefs we are unaware of and that we must change. 

We say all these affirmations, a la Jack Handy. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. I'm pretty, I'm talented, and gosh darn it, people like me. You know the drill. An entire industry (self help) is built on affirmations, or positive thinking. Or superstition. Whatever you want to call it. Thousands of bookshelves can't be wrong, can they? Louise Hay wrong? I'm okay, you're okay, wrong?

Okay. Fine. I'll buy it. My subconscious wants me to fail, so I fail. Maybe. So what do I do? Noah St. John will tell me. 

After many fluffy pages, we get to his 7 Hidden Steps. There's a nice pyramid graphic to illustrate them. (Allusion to Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I'll get to that another day.) I am ready. 

But first, I have to do a bunch of exercises. Filling in the blank stuff, with easy questions to answer like, what 5 things hold you back? Or, what is your deepest wish?

Hello? 

If this stuff were easy to figure out, I'd have sussed it already. And I've had a lot of therapy. 

But never mind. Skip ahead to the first step. Ready? Here it is: Afformations.

Yes, you read it right. Not affirmations, afformations. afFORMations. 

These are totally unlike affirmations. Really. Because affirmations are statements, and afformations are QUESTIONS. Oh. Okay. And St.John drops in the Latin roots of both words to point out the difference. Affirmation derives from affirmare, to make firm; while afformation is from afformare, to form. 

Get it? To form.  So he says the idea is to form positive questions based on what you want. The question is supposed to assume you have what you want. For example, How is it that I am so happy?  Or, Why am I so rich? Or just look up at that list of affirmations above and turn them into questions: Why am I so successful? Why does everything I do turn successful? Easy-peasy.

Throwing in the Buddhism principle of watering the seeds of intentionality (where, oh where have I come across this before? Why, in every book on success I've read, as well as in lots of excellent Zencasts), he says you have to ask positive questions to plant those positive seeds in your unconscious. 

I hate to break it to anyone who's reading Noah St. John as a first foray into the world of success self help, but this sounds an awful lot like pretty much everything I've read so far, except Benjamin Franklin. 

It did make for excellent dinner conversation last weekend. A glass of wine each, and the husband and I were compiling our Afformations as quick as we could think of them. Why was it so easy for me to hit number one on the New York Times Bestseller List? How is it that I am having lunch with Tina Fey tomorrow? Why am I appearing on Jon Stewart next week?  Why am I eating dinner dressed in thousand dollar bills? Why am I surrounded by vats of money? Why am I so successful I am bathing in vats of money? Why did I choose to scrub myself with thousand dollar bills instead of saving some of them for my children's college funds?

That was last weekend.

Ahem. I'm still waiting.

Maybe I'd better read Noah St. John's step two.