Do It Scared

There was a stretch in 2020 I should not have been able to get through.

My mom had passed two months earlier. The pandemic was at full tilt. I took a sales job. Cold calls. Door knocks. Talking to strangers all day, every day, with anxiety I could hear in my chest.

On paper, that was the worst possible job for me at that moment. My body did not want to be in rooms with new people. I could feel the tightness before every shift. I felt called to do it anyway.

Some of that was stubbornness. I refuse to accept defeat. I have always picked myself back up faster than was probably reasonable. The deeper reason was this. I knew if I did not move, I would not move. The only thing playing it scared guarantees you is staying in the same spot.

So I went and did it. Badly, at first.

I made bad calls. I got hung up on. I knocked on doors and got the door closed in my face. I felt the embarrassment that comes with being new at something in front of strangers. I had a manager at T-Mobile who watched me sweat through it for weeks before he said the line that changed everything.

Be like a duck in the water

"Be like a duck in the water. Let it float."

I think about that line often. The more I coach leaders, the more I think it is the truest definition of presence I have ever heard.

Presence is the willingness to stay in the room with what is happening. To not fight it. To keep moving while your hands are still shaking.

Most of what we call presence in our culture is composure. Hands steady, voice even, face calm. Useful for performance. Useless when something hard is happening to you.

Real presence is what lets you make the next call when the last call hung up on you. It is what lets you keep the meeting going when the room turns. It is what lets you sit with grief, or rejection, or fear, and not collapse into it.

Rejection is part of the journey. The hang-ups, the closed doors, the silences after you finished talking. The work is not to make them stop. The work is to let them float past you and pick up the next phone.

I got better at it over time. The chest tightness loosened. I learned to laugh some of it off. I closed deals. I built a career out of work I should not have been able to start.

What is true now

I will tell you something honest. I still catch myself falling back into old habits. Playing scared. Hesitating before a difficult message I need to send, a call I need to make, a piece I need to put my name on. Even now. The work is ongoing. It does not end when you get good at it.

What is true for me is true for the leaders I coach. The most senior person in any room is still doing the work of getting through their own fear. The title does not exempt anyone from that. Presence is what makes it possible to keep going while it is happening.

You will not feel great about something until you are good at it. You will not be good at something until you have practiced and failed and fallen on your face. There is no version of this where you skip the discomfort and arrive at the calm. The calm is built on the other side of doing it scared.

If you are sitting on a thing right now, waiting to feel ready, the readiness is not coming the way you think. Readiness gets built by acting before you have it.

Do it scared. Let the rejection float. Keep moving.

I believe in you.