INBOUND Bold Talks: Ann Handley "Follow the Fear"

When Laura first asked me to present here on this Bold Talk stage, she suggested that I do something that I don't normally do, which is to talk about. Well, what I normally do is to talk about content and about marketing. But she suggested that I should do something different. I encoded that as something that may be a little out of my comfort zone. And so my initial reaction was, no, I don't want to do that. That's actually not quite true. My actual reaction was this, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just hell no. I like my comfort zone. I'm comfortable there. That's why it's called the comfort zone. So what I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to tell you the story of how I came to be here on this stage giving a Bold talk and hopefully give you a little inspiration the next time you have an opportunity to do something that scares you. Everyone says that they were a shy child, but I took shyness and fear to an entirely new level. When I was eight years old, I wrote in my diary, I made a list of things that scare me. This went on for three pages. It started out kind of pedestrian. I wrote down things that scare a lot of kids, a lot of eight year olds, things like spiders, the dark, being alone in the house. And then it veered into some, I don't know, open territory, maybe stairs that don't have that back riser, right. The smell of the cellar, toddlers, scary creatures, my brother's teenage friends, old people, people in wheelchairs, people with foreign accents. And then finally, people. This extended into my home life too. I would hear the sound of unfamiliar voices in the driveway, or the sound of an unfamiliar car engine even. And I would make a beeline for my room and dive under my little twin bed and just wait there in the dark until it was safe to come out. Until I heard the goodbyes and I realized they're gone. I can resume my world again. When I was in the fourth grade, I had a teacher who believed that children learn best when they are in a kind of cooperative learning environment, when there's lots of room for sharing and we could learn from each other. So she took our desks out of their neat rows, one behind another, and put us instead in a big circle so that we could face each other. And when we had interaction, when we had sharing, we could talk together. She was an amazing teacher. I hated her. She really screwed with my whole strategy for school, which was to align myself with a student in front of me and during class discussions to sit as perfectly still as I could. So that I essentially disappeared. I got really great at faking sick. I got really good at convincing my mother that I was too sick to go to school, but not quite sick enough to go to the doctor. This sounds like it was no big deal, but there was actually kind of an art to it. And remember that I was doing this in a pre Google environment, right? Pre Google world, which is actually probably a good thing because I think if I had learned how to fake a pregnancy, remember I was nine years old, I think my mother would have been a little alarmed. I missed 32 days of school the first half of that year, which is kind of incredible, but it didn't seem to alarm my parents, actually. I think this was an age before parenting and self esteem was really invented. So. So I don't know, it was just business as usual in our house. One day that year, this teacher organized a kind of cooperative exercise. She shepherded us all out onto the field hockey field and engaged us in some sort of game of cooperative learning. Again, this woman had a theme. I'd like to tell you that I was as elegant as a princess on the field hockey field, that this is what I look like. But no, this wasn't me. Instead, I wasn't just shy, but I was also incredibly unathletic. And I always felt sorry actually for anybody who had me on their team in any sort of team sport environment. But anyway, so she has us out in the field. There weren't enough field hockey sticks to go around, so she split us into two groups. The first half was went out on the field and started playing this game. The other half of us, which included me, no surprise there, that I hung back and didn't get a stick, were supposed to change spots with the people on the field when the whistle blew. Oops. Damn it. Forget you didn't see that, ok? Because it'll make the lead in that much better. Anyway, so the first half is out in the field, she blows the whistle. And the idea was that we were supposed to exchange places. I didn't want to be on the field, so I rushed at the most athletic, the jockeyst girl in my classroom. And I said, hey, guess what? You can have a double turn on the field. I was kind of counting on the fact that in the chaos of the switch that the teacher wouldn't notice that I wasn't on the field. And that actually may have worked. I actually don't even think that she noticed that I wasn't on the field, but she definitely noticed that that jockey Girl played the entire game in my spot. For a teacher that valued cooperation and learning and self empowerment in students and all this kind of stuff, she really, she made such a big stink about this. She called my mom and dad, she involved the principal and. And that next marking period, that next report card, she gave me this F for conduct. Which is harsh. Don't you think that's harsh? I thought it was incredibly harsh. And it actually scarred me in a really significant way. Because as much as I defined myself as somebody who kind of went under the radar, who kind of kept a low profile, I also really defined myself by somebody who did really well in school. So this was actually a really big deal for me. I was only nine years old. As I said, I wouldn't read the Scarlet Letter for another couple years. But when I did, I was like, I totally get what Hester Prynne is going through. I totally understand that. Being marked by a letter for the rest of your life, that's how it felt to me. I thought back on that day on the field. I've thought about it a lot, actually. And in the days and the weeks and the months and the years that followed, I realized that when you opt out of things, when you say no, when you hang back, when you don't do things that scare you or make you uncomfortable, that actually it's failing at things that are a lot more significant than just a letter grade, I realize it's actually failing at life in a big way. I think that you pen yourself in, right? You limit yourself. You automatically say, this is who I am and this is who I'm not. You don't allow people to see you for who you really are. You don't allow people to love you for who you really are. When you define what's impossible before you think of what's possible, Rhode Island School of Design President John Maida had this great quote that I love. The computer will do anything within its abilities, but it will do nothing unless commanded to do so. The essayist, Deborah Millman wrote a piece about this, used his quote, and said that she thinks that people are like that too. We'll do things within our abilities far more readily than we'll command ourselves to do something beyond our abilities. That day in the field, and actually for most of my childhood, I think I created a kind of dead end for myself. I kind of created a space where I didn't command myself to do anything. But in the years that followed, I finally get it right, that your comfort zone is your dead zone. You've got to push yourself out of your comfort zone if you're going to do anything in life, if people are going to see you for who you are and if you're going to be loved for that. So I have three quick strategies that I use that I thought I would share with you today. Three things that I do to prod myself out of my comfort zone. Because as I started talking to you about today, I definitely like being there. So the first thing is ask. So what? Right? So what if I made a fool of myself on the field hockey field? So what if I make a fool of myself today? So what if the only thing you take out of this talk is that Anne Hanley was a very weird child? So what? My family still loves me. I'll survive. I'll still go home and live to tell a tale tomorrow. And maybe some of you might understand this message. Maybe it resonates with some, some of you. The second thing, assume that people love you. And if they don't assume, they just don't know you well enough yet. I learned this from my dog Simon, who passed away. I know. Cheers for Simon passed away last week. He was a glorious optimist. This dog thought that anybody that he met loved him. He was unembarrassed about his enthusiasm for meeting people. He just thought if you didn't love him immediately, if you backed away like some people do from dogs, then you just need to get to know him a little bit. I think that that's a great. It's a great philosophy to hold as a person. It's been a harder one for me to internalize, but when you do, it makes the room seem warmer somehow. It makes life friendlier. It makes you feel like you got this. And the last thing is to follow your fear because very often when something scares you, it's the very thing that's worth doing. Thank you very much.