the courage to become…
…and what holds us back
I’ve had quite a week. It seems as though I’m wandering from existential crisis to existential crisis. It’s all good things, which makes for good practice (harder to escape the comforts of patterns when things are rough).
I was in a conversation yesterday about pricing and material costs and costs per unit with a friend and I caught myself saying over and over again…
“I don’t have a business background.”
“I’m just making this up as I go.”
“Feel free to fix whatever I’m screwing up here. I’m just doing what I think is right.”
Looking back, I was trying to predict my own failure and lowering expectations along the way. This has been a longstanding practice and pattern of mine.
At its most positive, it would be called “under promise and overdeliver.” My pattern is more akin to lowering expectations so that I don’t have to experience the true sting of failure. Do just enough to appear competent, but not enough that I can’t wriggle out of the blame if something goes wrong.
It is, in short, a complete lack of imagination that brings me down this path. I cannot, with certain things, imagine my success.
As I write this, I’m transported back to an argument I had with my parents. No idea what it was about, but it ended with me shouting “I just want to be normal.” And, my memory is of my parents laughing about that (in the moment I’m not so sure that’s what they did, but certainly later when recalling it).
That was a moment of deep pain for me. It was a moment of realizing that I wasn’t like other people, but really feeling as though who I was wasn’t acceptable. Normal was what would take the pain away.
If I don’t stand out…
If I go unnoticed…
If people don’t create high expectations of me…
That’s what normal was to me. Skate by on the easy stuff. Don’t challenge yourself or step out of your lane.
My parents were right to laugh about that. It’s painful to think about how much of my life has been governed by the desire to be normal. More so, it’s a failure of imagination.
I was speaking with a colleague today and as we were about to wrap up our conversation and I offered this idea:
A robust imagination takes a great deal of courage.
He stopped talking for a moment and then asked, is that something you heard or something you just made up? I told him I just made it up based on our conversation. His response was that I needed to write it down, create a meme, and sign my name to it. So, I’m claiming it here.
It didn’t seem too out of norm or that big a deal to me. However, to him it was something he wanted to remember. I appreciated the encouragement (less so that I knew I was going to have to rewrite the post I had scheduled for today).
There are times when I am courageous and stand outside the norm. Much less than I’d like to admit though. It’s not comfortable out there, but I always learn a lot, and what I learn takes me to interesting and new places.
It may just be that courage is the antidote to anxiety, found in actions we imagine through the pause between stimulus and reaction.
The courage to take a step forward.
The courage to have compassion or self-compassion.
The courage to say something, to love someone, to become the person we imagine we could without the self-imposed limits.