Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.
Facing Fear 101
Image Credit: The Five Fifths, Stacy Abrams
“Not only must we stop telling ourselves no, we have to internalize our right to make mistakes and to use each error as an entry point to more knowledge.”
Stacey Abrams is a political leader, voting rights activist and bestselling author. After serving for eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Democratic Leader, in 2018, Abrams became the Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, winning at the time more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. Abrams was the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States, and she was the first black woman and first Georgian to deliver a Response to the State of the Union.
After witnessing the gross mismanagement of the 2018 election by the Secretary of State’s office, Abrams launched Fair Fight to ensure every American has a voice in our election system through programs such as Fair Fight 2020, an initiative to fund and train voter protection teams in 20 battleground states. Over the course of her career, Abrams has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at both the state and national levels. In 2019, she launched Fair Count to ensure accuracy in the 2020 Census and greater participation in civic engagement, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project, a public policy initiative to broaden economic power and build equity in the South.
Not everyone’s ambitions will be world domination or Carnegie Hall, but we should be driven beyond what we know and feel comfortable doing.”
Here are two examples of where Stacey shares common experiences of performing under pressure.
As an early manager:
Stacey reflects on her early management experiences as challenging. Being an introvert, she had a hard time connecting with her team. The team knew she wanted them to be successful, but she didn’t demonstrate she cared about them in a way that resonated. She did everything they asked for, thinking that utility is the highest form of love. The team needs something, she provides. But the team wanted to know that she cared about those things. Stacey started to check in with individual team members to demonstrate an interest in their lives.
It didn’t change how I think but it changed how I behaved. Sometimes the accommodation of other people means not that you change who you are but you adapt how you behave so that you can understand how they are. A lot of times we are so solid in our behavior and so right and certain about how we are, we forget that engagement and interaction does require compromise from both sides.
Reflecting on life choices:
Stacey avoided applying for a Rhodes scholarship and opted out of opportunities to Harvard (and other top ten universities) because she didn’t’ think she could compete. Considering the concept of failure:
I don’t see not winning the Rhodes scholarship as a failure. I think that probably there were ways I could have been better but just as with 2018 (election) part of what I want folks to understand is that it's not just what happens, it's how you process what happens. It's how you navigate it and use it to galvanize.
Stacey’s book focused a lot on our inner voices. We all have them. There are voices asking us to do things, scaring us away from big things, prompting us in certain directions.
How do we marshall our forces toward better decision-making?
FACING FEAR 101 (determining feelings v feel)
Fear disguised as practicality is what we do when what we really want seems impossibly out of reach—so we never dare to ask the universe for it.
Humans are anything but objective. Decision making comes down to feelings. If we are pushing ourselves at the boundaries of what we know, Fear, Anxiety, and Failure are constant companions. They are beside us as we encounter major challenges and milestones in our life and work. Once we get the feel of ourselves and our task, these characters are at a distance. We prefer a more remote relationship, but we do need to make peace with these characters given their influence.
The quality of our memory and the amount of information we can access helps increase our neutrality, but we tend to make choices and decisions based on feelings. Then we start to rationalize—to ourselves and others. It speaks to our vulnerability as human beings that for all the preparation, thought, intensity, and data we put toward choice, a real decision is delivered from the soul. So, when Hannah works through her anxiety and vulnerability on stage to not just find who she is, but declare it—we can learn from that.
To progress in life and work, we need to learn to discern the difference between feelings and feel in our work. Our work might be managing others, applying to graduate school, or learning a whole new career.
The feelings we have for our work—whether upsetting reactions or motivating passions—can distract our attention from the critical connection we have to the task at hand. To maintain our ability to perceive and recognize abilities in the presence of failure, success, drama, difficulty, exhaustion, discouragement, challenge, derivation, hurt, fear, anxiety, grief, uncertainty, excitement, and the like, we must check our emotions. When feelings threaten flood perception, we need to remain open, curious, empathetic, interested, fascinated, determined, brave, sensitive, intrigued, surprised, attentive, and focused.
THE PRACTICE
Making the Most of Mistakes. List three times you have taken risks in your personal life, work-life, or community life. What were the consequences? How did you feel immediately afterward? How do you feel now? Would you do it again?
1.
2.
3.
Know That You Don’t Know (and Admit It). Note times you have been tempted to pretend you know the answer.
Why did you feel that you should?
How did you handle the question? What happens when you say you do not know?
What happens if you pretend you do know?
Ignorance Is Bliss but Knowledge Is Better. Pick an area you wish you understood more about in your job, in your organization, or in your personal life.
Who can you ask to explain the subject to you?
How does it feel to ask for help? What have you learned about yourself by learning this subject?
Accept Being Wrong and Give Credit for Being Right. Identify an experience when someone took the credit for the work you did. Now, identify a time when you blamed someone else for a failure.
How could you live that moment differently?
Pay attention this week to opportunities to give credit and take responsibility. If you approach these opportunities consciously, will you act differently?
THE COMMITMENT
[ ] I commit to reflect on times I gave in to fear, anxiety, and doubt when I should have stepped forward, taken a stand, or asserted myself. I do this to prepare for a different response next time.
FURTHER READING
Lead From The Outside: Hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, and she includes practical exercises to help you realize your own ambition and hone your skills. Discusses candidly what Stacey has learned over the course of her impressive career in politics, business, and the nonprofit world: that differences in race, gender, and class provide vital strength, which we can employ to rise to the top and create real and lasting change.
Our Time Is Now: This book draws on extensive research from national organizations and renowned scholars, as well as anecdotes from her life and others’ who have fought throughout our country’s history for the power to be heard. The stakes could not be higher. Concrete solutions create a foundation for inspiration to stand up for who we are, now.
In Conversation With Holland Taylor: (video via Prime and YouTube) After witnessing the gross mismanagement of the 2018 election by the Secretary of State's office, Abrams launched Fair Fight to ensure that every Georgian has a voice in our election system. She talks with Holland Taylor for a revealing conversation about her politics, her own personal story, and her future plans.
In her words…
“Because I learned long ago that winning doesn’t always mean you get the prize. Sometimes you get progress, and that counts.”
“If you can walk away for days, weeks, or years at a time, it is not an ambition, it’s a wish. Wishes feel good and rarely come true. Ambition, on the other hand, fuels your days and refuses to be ignored. It challenges your sense of self and fulfills your sense of wonder.“
“We all set our sights on jobs we want, titles we covet. But like dating the wrong person, we have to learn to understand what is true for us and be willing to break up to find the real thing.”
“When we show up, act boldly, and practice the best ways to be wrong, we fail forward. No matter where we end up, we’ve grown from where we began.”
“We must cease being participants in our own oppression.”
“Admitting mistakes is a fundamental skill too few of us learn. In part, this is because we’ve been taught it’s wrong to be wrong.”
“Invention, discovery, and empires are built of changes taken with high degrees of failure.”
“Effective leaders are able to say to the person they want to impress: “I don’t know.”
“The most significant successes come from letting your light shine, embracing failure, and getting good at being wrong.”
“Names matter; labels matter. We should always pursue the highest title available and fight for the labels that reflect our clout.”
“The anchors of belief should never weigh down the capacity for thoughtful engagement and reasonable compromise.”
“Logic is a seductive excuse for setting low expectations.”
“Effective leaders must be truth seekers, and that requires a willingness to understand truths other than our own.”
“Good leaders are always at the ready, but not always at the front.”
“Remember this in the darkest moments, when the work doesn’t seem worth it, and change seems just out of reach: out of our willingness to push through comes a tremendous power…use it.”
“Not only must we stop telling ourselves no, we have to internalize our right to make mistakes and to use each error as an entry point to more knowledge.”
“Financial independence gives us the power to decide our futures and liberate our conception of what’s possible.”
“We will all, at some point, encounter hurdles to gaining access and entry, moving up and conquering self-doubt; but on the other side of the capacity to own opportunity and tell our own story.”
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.