#283: It’s Time to Get Comfortable Feeling Uncomfortable

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Well, hello there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. The number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries today, I'd like to share some thoughts with you on the topics of courage, fear, risk and perfectionism. With the main concentration of our discussion on the topic of courage, these are all related, but courage is the one thing that I just feel I need to address because this is a constant issue. I know it is for me and I know just mustering courage at the right time is an issue we all have to deal with when we're out there. Self employed professionals selling creative services. A few years ago I published an episode on the topic of yet another quality that's highly valuable when you're on your own. And that's the quality of grit. And I called grit the ultimate ingredient to succeeding as a self employed creative professional. In fact, I even said that the most important quality you must have to succeed over the long haul as a freelance professional is grit. And I still feel that way. But since then I've come to recognize that there's another ingredient that precedes grit and that's courage. And it's so critically important because as you already know, launching, growing and running a creative business requires quite a bit of courage. You're risking so much, you're risking failure, you're risking ridicule from friends and relatives and colleagues who don't understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. And our self esteem and sense of self worth is often so tied to what we do for a living. So when our work is rejected by a client, when our work is, when a client is not happy with what we gave them, that is can be very difficult to take. And developing that thick skin is quite a challenge. At the same time, it's unhealthy to have your entire sense of self worth and self esteem tied to your work, tied to the product, what you create, that's a topic for a totally different episode. But the thing is, growth requires a heavy dose of courage. There's no doubt about it. And we're talking about courage every day, every week. It's not a one time thing. It just courage permeates every aspect of our success as self employed professionals. If you want to have a small or average impact, you're not going to need much courage. But if you want to make a real difference for your clients, for yourself and your family, you need to develop greater and greater courage. And develop it and have it ready to go at the right time. Courage to get out there. Courage to knock on doors. Courage to go after better clients. Courage to raise your fees to match your value. Courage to try new ideas. Courage to offer new services or to position your value differently. Courage to tell a client no when you need to. Courage to set and uphold client boundaries. Courage to showcase your work or to highlight why you're a better choice than maybe somebody else your client might be considering. Courage to tell the CEO of your client's business in a respectful way why her idea will not work. And that's why I've said for years that owning a business, especially a business where you're selling your ideas, your talents, advice and your thinking, is one of the best personal development initiatives you could ever embark on. Because frankly, it's not about the money or the achievements. It's about the person you become in the pursuit of those things. My biggest skill, the business that I run has given me, is the ability to deal with fear and the ability to build up and strengthen my courage. I don't think you ever arrive there. We're going to be talking about that today. But certainly I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn't have the courage that I have today had it not been for launching and growing my freelance business and eventually then my coaching and training business. But back to courage I've been seeing, and the reason I wanted to share my thoughts on this today is that I've been seeing a decline in this cardinal virtue in our society. And I find that very troubling. I find that today fear is paralyzing millions of people and we are rapidly becoming a risk averse nation, people, community. I thought we were already heading in that direction of being more and more risk averse, but I'm afraid that it's accelerating and I don't think that is a healthy trend. I've been reading some history books over the past three years, especially early to mid 20th century history. In the contrast between the courage people had in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s and today is just, it's a dramatic contrast. There's no comparison. And as much as we have progressed, and we'll talk about that in a minute, as much as we've progressed as a human race, I find that we've also gotten a little comfortable as we've moved up the Maslow pyramid of needs. We no longer have to work as hard, we no longer have to put ourselves out there as much. And I think that just makes us softer. It makes us weaker and it will cause some serious disappointment and some serious problems, not just for ourselves, for our families, but also for our societies in general. Steven Pinker and I've mentioned him a couple times in the podcast. He is the author of several excellent books, including Enlightenment now, which is a massive book, but it is a very important book and it's a book about hope. It's based on science and facts, real data about the progress we have made as a people over the years. And we have made tremendous progress. So that is the good side of all of this. Poverty is being wiped out worldwide, which I found quite shocking because that is not the narrative that I've been hearing out there. And I wanna read from chapter 20, just real quick of Enlightenment now where Steven Pinker talks about poverty. He says, and I quote, the world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago. And the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across the world's countries and people. The proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90% to less than 10%. And within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book, it could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in most of human history, has vanished from most of the world and under nourishment and stunting are in steady decline. That is quite remarkable. But it's not just poverty. We've made serious improvements. If you read the book, there's a chapter for every one of these areas. Improvements in health, Massive improvements in health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life, happiness, existential threats and other things. As shocking as that might sound, we have made not just incremental but again massive improvements in each and one of those, each and every one of those areas. So I encourage you to read the book because it will give you hope. Having said that, I do believe again the progress in a way has made us softer. That's just my observation and that is not a good trend I find in my analysis is that the pandemic has been terrible in terms of encouraging safety over taking calculated and healthy risks. It's made us much more risk averse. And I've seen a huge shift in society over the past couple of years where as a whole we don't want risks and we're willing to give up many of our freedoms to have the government and other entities give us more protection, more apparent safety. In fact, I feel like we seem to start we're valuing protection now above anything else. And we mistakenly believe that outside forces can give us that kind of protection and solve many of our problems. That's a huge mistake and again, a huge difference from where we were as a society just 50 or 60 years ago. It feel like back then, it's a stark contrast in terms of how we recognized our agency, we took care of one another, and we valued risk taking much, much more. And when we failed, when we didn't achieve our goal, it wasn't as devastating as it seems to be now when we trip and we fall and we fail to reach that goal. So I've been seeing that we're starting to even reward risk aversion and we're teaching our kids that safety is best, safety first, above all else. That is not sustainable. We need to get back to going after things that are difficult because that's good for you. We need to put ourselves out there and we need to stop thinking and just obsessing over perfectionism rather than growth because perfectionism and courage don't mix. In fact, let's talk a bit about perfectionism because this is all related and perfectionism, unlike what a lot of people believe out there, is not a virtue. There's a huge difference between perfectionism and excellence. I believe in striving for excellence. I do not believe in striving for trying to attempt perfectionism. I recently came across a very interesting article on BBC website and I'll link to it here in the show notes on the subject of perfectionism and I wanted to quote a few things from it. Some of the things that I learned. One is not that shocking or shouldn't be that shocking. Researchers are finding that perfectionism is dangerous, that it leads to a long list of health problems and that perfectionism is on the rise. Two social psychologists quoted in the article, Thomas Cuaron and Andrew Hill, actually conducted a meta analysis of rates of perfectionism from 1989 to 2016. This was the first study to compare perfectionism across generations and it found significant increases among the more recent undergraduates, college undergraduates in the U.S. the U.K. and Canada. They quoted child development researcher at West Virginia University as saying, and I quote, as many as 2 in 5 kids and adolescents are now perfectionists. We're starting to talk about how it's heading toward an epidemic and a public health issue. The article went on to say that perfectionism is an ultimately self defeating way to move through the world. It's built on an excruciating irony that making and admitting mistakes is a necessary part of growing and learning and being human. It also makes you better your career and relationships and life in general. By avoiding mistakes at any cost, you, a perfectionist, can make it harder to reach their own lofty goals. So according to the article, perfectionist tendencies have been linked to a laundry list of clinical issues. And this shouldn't be that surprising. What is surprising is how many of them there are. So it can lead to depression and anxiety even in children. By the way, self harm, social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, binge eating, anorexia, bulimia, other eating disorders, post traumatic stress disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, insomnia, hoarding, chronic headaches, and most damning of all, even early mortality and suicide. Now again, this isn't supposed to be or intended to be a negative episode. I just want to show you the dark side of seeking perfectionism, of avoiding risk because it's not good for us. But perfectionism, as I mentioned earlier, is not always bad. Some researchers, and this is from the article as well, say that there is actually an adaptive or healthy kind of perfectionism which is characterized by having high standards, motivation and discipline. Again, just striving for excellence, right? As opposed to maladaptive or unhealthy perfectionism, when your best never seems to be good enough and not meeting goals frustrates you. So it shouldn't be surprising that that meta analysis that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago from the article, which by the way was based on 43 studies, found that people who express more maladaptive perfectionism experience significantly more burnout, among other serious problems. The article pointed out something very important. Perfectionism is not a behavior, it's a way of thinking about yourself. So this is really all about what you're telling yourself, the story you're telling yourself. When you choose not to go after something important, when you choose not to push yourself and do the scary stuff that you know will help you grow, that you know has good upside for you. For instance, when your white paper is not coming together very well, or when you don't land that client or a new prospect tells you that you're too expensive, you know, it's, you have a choice. What do you tell yourself? What are you telling yourself about your value, about the client, about your work, about your experience? It's not what happens as much as how you interpret the event. And when you're telling yourself Something negative, such as, wow, you suck at this, or this is hopeless, or who do you think you are? You're discouraging yourself to try new things, to take healthy risks that will help you grow. And that brings us back to courage. Anything worthwhile in life demands courage. And we need to change our relationship with courage. In a relationship with fear, being scared is okay. Okay, it's natural to be scared. I mean, it's just the way we're wired. We are going to be scared sometimes when we go after new things, when we take risks. But being afraid, which is basically being full of fear, that's not okay. So there's a big difference. You can be scared. That's natural. But being afraid is not the right approach. That's not what you want. One helps you stay alert. It wakes you up, informs you of danger. That's being scared. The other, full of fear, or being afraid drags you down. It weakens you. It can even paralyze you. Now, nobody is without fear. I'm not talking or suggesting that you have to be fearless, but you have to work on overcoming it. You can't achieve greatness if you can't push your way through that fear. In fact, I'll even say this. If you're living without courage, you're living a boring life. And here's a thought, and this actually came from Ryan Holiday in his amazing book, Courage Is Calling. He said, what would the world look like if everyone listened when that's not possible was said. So when somebody said that's not possible, if everyone listened to that and went about their way and didn't try it, didn't put themselves out there, what would the world look like today? In fact, I really can't recommend this little book, Enough Courage Is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave by Ryan Holiday. And I'm going to read you an excerpt from one of the chapters, because it is so powerful and speaks directly to we've been talking about here today. Where would we be without people brave enough to challenge the odds? If every entrepreneur activist in general listened to the predictions, what kind of world would this be? If every oncologist faced the facts of their diagnoses, no patient would ever be saved. If every team down in the fourth quarter believed they were beaten, there would never be any comebacks. If every RAF pilot had looked at the numbers in 1940, a 1 in 10 chance of dying in each sortie, would Britain have been able to hold out? If we only did what we were sure of, if we only proceeded when things were favorable, then history would never be made. The averages have been against everything that ever happened. That's why we call it the mean. We have to remember that these polls, these estimations, these statistical models, these things are static. What they cannot predict for, what they cannot account for, is the individual with agency, the human being who makes events happen rather than simply sitting back and waiting for things to happen to them. It takes courage to look at the averages and say I'm not average. To say somebody will be the exception, and it may as well be me. That's what courage is. In fact, there is no courage without bad odds, without a willingness to risk losing the job, the game, the deal, your life. If it was a sure thing, what would be brave about it? You have to realize that you are not average. You never have been. You are one of one. You have always had what it took to defy the odds. That brings us to what happens when we fall. Because we will fall. And we will fall if we go after worthwhile goals. And we need to talk about how to react to setbacks and disappointments and failures. Because again, when we muster that courage, but we don't reach that goal, we stumble. We're going to fall and scrape our knees. And nobody I know loves experiencing a setback in their life or their business. In fact, I'd argue that most of us dread the thought of having a big setback. I know I do. Whether it's losing a client or having a project go wrong very quickly. Getting a bigger tax bill than you expected, getting a no from a huge prospect after you thought it was a done deal. Those aren't good days. It can make us question what we're doing. It might even get us to ask ourselves if we shouldn't just hang it up and do something else for a living. I've been there so many times, I experience at least two or three notable setbacks every week. And at least one or two big setbacks per month. In fact, it's interesting that I'm recording this for you right now, because I'm in the middle of a significant setback in my business. And it's, you know, it's not necessarily a major one. I will get through this. But it's certainly the kind of setback where we just want to bang our head against the wall. Sometimes we just want to bury our heads in your hands and just let out a big sigh. I feel like that often. And achieving a degree of financial success, believe me, has not reduced the frequency of those events. If anything, it just amplifies the impact it Just you never quite arrive. You never really do. So if you're waiting, oh, well, once I hit this level of income, the problems don't go away. They're just different set of problems. But are setbacks something we should dread? Or is there another way of looking at setbacks? I've tried just about everything you can imagine to make my life and my business better and easier. And I've got to tell you again, the setbacks have not slowed down. If anything, the more I push myself, the more I try, the more I succeed, the more setbacks I experience. And I'm not alone here. I've talked to a lot of very successful people and they have agreed with me 100% on this. I've come to the realization that not only will you have more setbacks, the better your business does, but we should all start thinking about setbacks differently. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that we've all become too soft. Sure, we've all had our challenges, personal and professional. As an entrepreneur, you've probably experienced more challenges and hardship than the average person working for somebody else. But again, when I think of our grandparents and what they went through, grandparents and great grandparents and the. The parents, their parents before them. We're living in Disney World. We really are. Life was so difficult back then. We simply have no idea what we think of as setbacks would be a dream come true scenario for someone in the 18th century. Don't get me wrong, I love progress. I'm grateful to be alive today. This truly is the best time to be alive. And I believe that with every fiber of my being. But all this progress has ensured that we no longer have to face the challenges that made our ancestors stronger. Which means that we're not as well equipped to deal with setbacks. So question is, what if we condition ourselves to look at setbacks differently after the initial shock and disappointment, what if we change the conversation we have with ourselves from, why is this happening to me? This is so unfair. I'm not happy about the situation. I wasn't expecting it, but there's nothing I can do about it now. What's done is done. So the big questions now are, how can I extract value from this experience from the setback? What can I learn here? What is God or the universe trying to teach me? And how can I use this to get better, stronger and smarter? Easier said than done. Well, yeah, of course, but that's the challenge. That's the challenge I've decided to take on this year. And my hope is that you'll decide to join me in this challenge. I know I'm going to need constant reminding. It's going to be difficult to turn that switch. At times the emotions might be too high. That's going to make it harder. But I'm committed to becoming stronger, better, smarter, and more resilient in a world that rewards conformance and safety, that discourages risk, that ridicules those who try crazy things and fall down over and over again until they finally succeed. The obstacles in our way are an advantage, not an adversity. And as Ryan Holiday reminds us, the enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this. Life is filled with problems, disappointments, heartache. Look, you never arrive behind mountains or more mountains. Don't make safety and comfort your ultimate goal. Sure, use those as rewards and necessities, but don't make them the target. Don't make them the end goal. Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's what courage truly demands. So how about you? You ready to join me in this courage challenge? We've got this. We've got this together. If we stick together. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this discussion and some of these random thoughts on courage and perfectionism and fear and risk. I hope it maybe sparked something in you. And I just wanted to remind you to grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More in Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper As a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other podcast episodes. Enjoy and have a great rest of your day. Take care.