Tag: confidence

Failing Well

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“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Last weekend when we were in Leavenworth, WA, we went to an adventure park to ride a roller coaster. Or maybe I should say a roller-coaster-ish kind of ride because the cars were individual and the driver could apply the brakes as much as they wanted. Another clarification: by “we” I meant my kids rode with my dear friend, Doug, because I’m an endurance person, not a speed person.

Now that I have all those caveats in place, on with the story.

Eight-year-old Miss O had no hesitation and climbed right in to ride with Doug. Talking with four-year-old Mr. D about it, he was clearly torn. He didn’t want to do it. And then he did. He flip flopped a couple of times. Since I was pretty sure he’d like it, I was trying to figure out how to nudge him in the direction of trying it.

But even though Miss O didn’t hesitate on this challenge, she and I had just been having a conversation about failing when it came to learning to ride her hoverboard. She asserted that life was easier for me because I never failed. I told her I fail all the time which is why is doesn’t faze me much any more. In fact, I rarely think of it as failing but just as a step towards the next thing I need to do.

On the drive to Leavenworth, I’d been listening to the Ten Percent Happier podcast, The Science of Failing Well where Dan Harris was talking with Amy Edmonson, a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. She had three points that stuck with me about taking risks:

  • Make the risk as small as possible: This point reminded me of gambling – make a bet but don’t put all your chips in.
  • Have a hypothesis: Know what you are trying to test or prove
  • Learn from the attempt: Use the experience and hypothesis to extract information for the next thing you might try.

I think a lot about what creates confidence. What my parents did to create kids who are willing to try hard things because for all the differences between my siblings and me, we are all game to take on new challenges. So I’ve tried to figure out how I can do the same for my kids. While there’s much that remains a mystery to me, what I’ve identified is that my willingness to try and fail might be the single most defining characteristic in the arc of my life.

So, I told Mr. D he didn’t have to do it. But if he did, he only had to try one ride, Doug could go as slow as he wanted, and that I thought he’d like riding in a car on a track. When it came to his turn, Mr. D was a little nervous but resolutely game. Until I greeted him at the exit ramp, that is. He rolled back in with a huge grin on his face!

He had so much fun that he learned he wanted to do it again. And the second time he went up with his hands in the air.

Life is a roller coaster and I’m glad that I continue to ride. The metaphorical kind at least.

(featured photo is mine)

(quote is from Real Life of MSW blog: Being Brave)

Waiting for a Break

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“We learn how to be resilient and handle difficult things by PRACTICING dealing with difficult things.” – Tina Payne Bryson

We went to our favorite beach on Whidbey Island this weekend. We rented an AirBnB that allowed dogs so it was our puppy, Cooper’s, first vacation.

The weather was really blustery. After a particularly stormy week in the Seatle area, there was driftwood all over the beach. When my son, four-year-old Mr. D and my friend, Eric, went down to the beach, Mr D busied himself throwing huge pieces of wood into the water. And by huge, I mean almost as big as he is.

When Eric remarked on this, Mr. D turned to him and said, “I can do hard things.”

Here’s the thing about that. Every day for the ten days preceding the vacation, I’d sent Mr. D to school with a note. In the note, it counted down how many sleeps until vacation, explained that we had to go to school/work in order to be able to go on vacation, and ended with the sentence, “We can do hard things.”

Normally Mr. D doesn’t need coaxing to go to school. But coming off of some crud he caught at Thanksgiving, and the dark and stormy days of the last couple of weeks, it felt like he was tired. You know that deep, soul-level tired where even after good night’s sleep it feels like you are exhausted.

Of course, Mr. D cannot yet read but he carried the note with him anyway. He didn’t say much about it. But I knew he was paying attention because the note started ripping in places because it’d been opened and refolded so many times.

Sometimes we have to push through to earn a break. And I’m incredibly heartened to know that when we do, it builds the confidence that “We can do hard things.”

Comparing Our Differences

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“Confidence isn’t thinking you’re better than anyone else, it’s realizing that you have no reason to compare yourself to anyone else.” – Maryam Hasnaa

This was originally published on 6/15/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

My 6-year-old daughter came home from school the other day and said she had a bad day. She explained saying that a kid on the playground was comparing her. Not understanding, I asked her to say more. She relayed that he was saying, “I can do the monkey bars faster. I can go longer. I can skip more bars.”

Oh, I get it – comparing.

We are all different – so why do we compare? To get some perspective, I turned to research professor Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart. She defines comparison as “Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other – it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out.”

And apparently, we all do comparison: “Researchers Jerry Suls, René Martin, and Ladd Wheeler explain that ‘comparing the self with others, either intentionally or unintentionally, is a pervasive social phenomenon.’”

So we all do comparison but what we have control over is how we let it affect us. I was struck by a comment I heard on a 10 Percent Happier podcast with TV commentator and author Alicia Menendez. She talked about management assessment she once did that measured the difference between who one naturally is with the way one self-presents in the work environment to show how much one is self-correcting. The evaluator said to her “So, you are a very introverted person who is overcompensating to be very extroverted in the environment you are in. You are really tired at the end of the day, aren’t you?”

Changing from who we are is exhausting. Maybe we do it because we compare or maybe we do it because we are self-conscious. When I decided to have kids as a single-person at age 46, I was self-conscious of being different. Not that there aren’t other older, single mothers in the world but because there weren’t any in my direct experience.

Comparison to what I thought was the norm made me feel ashamed. It was only after I knew I didn’t want to pass that on to my children that I started owning my differences. That has freed me to do many other things like the post I wrote last week about how I choose to use the time that I otherwise might spend being in a relationship to listen to podcasts and read great books. We are all different, might as well enjoy it. Reading the research that Brené Brown includes in her book reminds me that I don’t have to teach my children not to compare. I only have to teach them to understand how it affects them.

As Brené says about comparing herself to the swimmer in the lane next to hers, “My new strategy is to look at the person in the lane next to me, and say to myself, as if I’m talking to them, Have a great swim. That way I acknowledge the inevitable and make a conscious decision to wish them well and return to my swim.”

I also written today about how creativity might be one of our biggest assets for our resumes: Creativity as a Job Skill

(featured photo from Pexels)

Friendship Though the Ages and Stages

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“Well, you can’t make old friends.” – Zadie Smith

Have you thought back to how you survived middle school? I mean, I think it’s safe to assume anyone that is reading this is past the age of 13. I remember that age as being the start of understanding that there was a whole wide world outside of my family and it involved crushes, hopes and dreams, and weird things happening to my body that I didn’t want to talk about with my mom.

Katie. That’s how I made it through middle school. My dearest friend that I’ve known since age seven. She was over at my house yesterday spending time with me, Miss O, Mr. D and Cooper. I list us all out because we all needed time with her.

She reminds me of a line I got from Mark Nepo in the Book of Awakening. In German, the root of the word friendship means place of high-safety. With old friends, I think that might be especially so because they knew us from before we were anything. We had dreams of what we might become, but now that we’ve hit middle life, we’ve cycled through a lot of different ages and stages, and old friends, like Katie have seen it all.

Because to be friends for this long, I don’t think there’s any way to maintain any artifice. We’ve survived the ups and downs of life as well as testing out the waters of how we meet the world. We’ve had to work out whether we are friendly, trustworthy, and kind – and apologize and make amends when we’ve fallen short.

Watching Katie with my family, I realize that there’s an associative property of friendship. That my little ones trust her as much as I do. Probably because they can sense that ease that comes with old friends. Well, that and because Katie is simply amazing – present, smart, funny, kind, and encouraging.

I think back to my naivety and hopefulness in middle school. It was confusing and emotional as we worked out what came next in life. I’m less naïve now as I know that middle life also brings challenges with family, friends, aging, and loss. But I’m still quite hopeful – probably because I’ve been lucky enough to have a Katie, then and now.

(featured photo is me (left) and Katie (right) – maybe in middle school?)

Try, Try, and Try Again

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“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” – Mary Anne Radmacher

I’m sure I’m not the first parent to say that my kids are making me insane. I don’t mean that in a pull-my-hair out kind of way though. I mean it according to the phrase, “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

Because it feels to me that letting my kids do the same thing over and over again, often comes with the different result.

Last week, Mr. D wanted to ride his bike home from pre-school. We couldn’t do it on Monday or Tuesday. But when Wednesday rolled around, I dropped him at school with his bike, that he proudly rolled in to park next to his teacher’s bike, so that we could ride home.

I had Miss O and her friend with me that afternoon so the three of us rode to Mr. D’s school to pick him up. It took us about 10 minutes to get there. Mr. D sagely choose to walk his bike down the hill to the bike path to begin the mile-and-a-half home. Which is a long way on a bike with training wheels, but he, as our leader, bravely started out.

And then 50 yards later stopped and said he couldn’t do it. Uh-oh. We were a long way from home. So I suggested we take a snack break. After a nice snack break in the shade, we were back on the bikes. Mr. D again set off as the leader and this time went about 100 yards before stopping and declaring he couldn’t do it. That time we stopped to look at ants.

In that fashion, we slowly made our way home with a great deal of tension between the two girls who were antsy to race ahead and Mr. D taking breaks. It took us almost an hour-and-a-half.

The next day, Thursday, when we got in the car to take Mr. D to school, he said, “I want to ride my bike home from school.”

Oh boy. I might have rolled my eyes when no one was looking. But here’s the thing – I know he can do it. He’s done it before, just not at the end of the day. So I loaded his bike in the car and dropped him at school. This time when I picked him up, Miss O wasn’t with me and I attached a third wheel seat to the back of my bike so that if he chose not to ride his own, he could sit back there.

For that attempt, he made it about halfway round the lake before he decided to try out the third wheel. I chained his bike to a tree and we rode home that way, even though he’d never wanted to try that “trail-a-bike” before. Then I had to pack up both kids into the car, drive back around the lake to pick up his bike chained to the tree. The result – another hour-and-a-half expedition to pick up Mr. D from school a mile and a half away.

So then Friday rolled around. When we got in the car to take Mr. D to school, he said, “I want to ride my bike home from school.”

This is where the insanity comes in — I said “Okay” and loaded the bike into the car. On the way home, he made it half way round, I chained the bike to the tree and he rode the rest of the way on the third wheel. But it was easier this time and I popped by the tree to pick up his bike when I went to get Thai food after my friend Eric arrived for dinner.

And each time? Well, there were moments of tension but we also had a good time, and had fun trying. My kids constantly remind me that life is insane – in the best way. That the boundaries of what I previously thought I could do are just mental barriers to blow through. That there is joy in trying the same thing over and over again – and getting a different result.

I’ve written a companion piece about kids and joy: Bundle of Whose Joy? on the Heart of the Matter blog. Please pop over there if you have a minute.

Sacred Spaces for Stories

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“Our actual job as writers is to make the world a little more clear. A little less cluttered. A little less ugly.” – Ann Handley

In my favorite coffee shop, there are three cushy chairs by the window, organized around a low coffee table. I’m usually early enough to get my seat, the one where I can put my tea on the windowsill and plug in my laptop, and then the other chairs eventually fill up. Usually it’s two people by themselves like me but sometimes it’ll be two people together and then since they are facing me, we’re all in it together.

A while back I heard two 50-something women sitting in the chairs together catching up after a while. One was talking about her process for measuring progress on her diet, lamenting the fact that any weight gain or loss she experiences happens three days after she eats (or doesn’t), making the intervening days till the scale registers seem interminable.

She sighed and said she had a friend who was overweight and very happy. “Somedays I think I should just give it up and follow her example. She’s not sweating over everything she eats.”

Her friend replied, “No! For goodness sakes, stay the course.”

And then the first woman smiled and said, “Thank you, that’s what friends are for.”

As far as blog fodder goes, this seems like totally safe territory. I don’t know these women and will likely never see them again to report on whether the first, who I couldn’t pick out of a lineup, stayed with her eating regimen.

It reminds me of right after I found out about my husband’s (now ex) infidelities and told my friend, Bill, about the drama over dinner in a tiny Japanese restaurant with tables barely a foot apart.

I started the story with my business partner inviting me out to lunch even though we’d never socialized just the two of us. Then I showed up and he’d asked to be seated in a booth in a section of the restaurant that wasn’t open. At this point, I was on pins and needles and felt like I was going to throw up, so that when he finally started down the list of my ex’s infidelities, it was pretty awful but almost a relief from the anticipation.

Then my business partner cooked up a scheme that he’d send me an “anonymous” email with the information so that I didn’t have to tell my ex how I’d found out.

By that evening, the email hadn’t arrived and I had gone out to dinner with my dear friends, Jill and Sue, as planned before the whole drama unfolded. The business partner called to ask if I had gotten the email and I said I hadn’t. He said he was okay if I told my ex I found out from him.

At 5am the next morning when I finally opened the conversation with my ex, “Have you ever been unfaithful to me?” and he answered, “no,” the ball was rolling. His primary question was “how did you find out?”

When I couldn’t keep it secret any longer, I revealed the business partner’s role. My ex packed a bag of clothes to check into a hotel and then told me he was going to the business partner’s house. “He betrayed me!” he shouted, completely missing the irony of the comment that we were talking about his infidelity.

As I launched into the part of the story about calling my business partner on 8am that morning (which happened to be New Year’s Eve) telling my ex was heading his way to confront him, I noticed that all the tables around us in that small Japanese restaurant were silent. I didn’t mind. It seemed they all deserved to find out that my ex barged in to the business partner’s house without knocking but didn’t hit him or inflict any other physical damage. He didn’t ever forgive him though.

So maybe I ended up as blog fodder for someone else. Fair enough – I don’t mind on many levels, the most obvious one being that I shared it in a public space.

Of course, this becomes a trickier balance when we blog, talk, preach, about people we know. Talking with a fellow blogger last week, I know I’m not the only one that wrestles with how to make sure that people in my life know that I honor a sacred space for their shared stories.

I take my cue on how to navigate this from my father. Growing up as a pastor’s kid, there was a definite likelihood that you could end up in a sermon. My dad would share stories or funny things we said – but didn’t share secrets or embarrassing moments, and he had a way of making the point about what he learned, instead of ever making us the butt of the joke.

Of course, I could not write about the characters in my life at all but they are a great deal of my inspiration – for learning, laughing and, loving. So I walk the line of asking for permission and (hopefully) being gently respectful because in these post-Covid days, I don’t often hear conversations in coffee shops.

For more about creativity, please check out my Heart of the Matter post this morning, The Creative Rhythm and subscribe to that blog as well! The theme for the month is creativity so there will be great inspiration to be found!

(featured photo is of my kids telling me secrets)

Leaps of Faith

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“Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.” – Margaret Shepard

When I was 6-months-old, and my sister and brother were 4 and 6-years-old respectively, my dad took an offer to be a pastor of the church in Manilla, Philippines. It was 1970, the Vietnam war was raging. Ferdinand Marcos was the President of the Philippines. Six months after our family moved there, there was a phony insurrection and Marcos declared Martial Law. We stayed for almost 6 more years after that.

I’ve often wondered if that gutsy move by my parents set up a pattern in us kids. Bigger than any theological belief, did they show us that leaps of faith are possible? It’s the topic of my Heart of the Matter post today. Heart Dreams That Call For Big Leaps

(featured photo from Pexels)

When Not to Write Back

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“Wine had to be grapes first. Diamonds had to be rocks first. Butterflies had to be caterpillars first. Rainbows had to be storms first.” – Matshona Dhilwayo

On Monday night, my hometown football team, the Seahawks won their first season game against the Denver Broncos. It was remarkable because our former star quarterback, Russell Wilson, just traded to the Broncos and because expectations are pretty low for the Seahawks this season. Our new quarterback, Geno Smith, was the backup quarterback for three years waiting on the bench while Russell Wilson got all the limelight.

I didn’t watch the whole game but after I got the kids into bed, I turned on the tv to see the final moments and caught a glimpse of something wonderful. At the end of the game when the Seahawks pulled off a 17-16 victory, Geno Smith said to the interviewer in an ecstatic moment “They wrote me off, I ain’t write back though.”

I don’t think you need to be a Seahawks fan or even a football fan to enjoy that sentiment. The pure belief to persevere when others don’t see your potential. I mean, he’s a pro quarterback in the NFL so clearly he’s a remarkable athlete but in the circles that he runs in, it’s easy to imagine that he wasn’t feeling a lot of respect.

How do we maintain our belief in ourselves when it doesn’t feel like the world is in accord? It seems like we are talking about the very source of our purpose and calling. And we are talking about deep knowing whether we are walking on the right path and sticking there in the tough moments because we have the guts to keep going. It speaks to finding our why, as Simon Sinek says and I wrote about in a post by the same name.

Perhaps the world will never value the contribution that we make in the way we envision it should happen. But time and time again I’ve found that if I stay in accord with that small quiet God-whisper and keep trying, SOMETHING will come of it.

Or as Geno Smith says, listen to our hearts so that we know when NOT to write back.

What’s your metaphor or mantra when you are sticking with something hard?

(Mark, I’m sorry that your beloved Broncos had to lose in order to inspire the content of this post. 🙂 )

(featured photo from Pexels)

A Kind Word

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“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.” – Lao Tzu

I received a lovely email from someone this week that was incredibly kind and complimentary. It ended with the sentence, “So, I just thought that was the sort of thing a person ought to hear about themselves.”

Encouragement, defined by Oxford Languages, is “the action of giving someone, support, confidence and hope.” The word origin is from the French from en (make, put in) + corage (heart, daring) from which I draw that encourage could be “make daring” or “put in heart.”

Using either definition, I am always deeply grateful for the people who have and continue to cheer me along. It is a gift that takes just a sentence or two but has a ripple effect that lasts so much longer than a conversation.

I find encouragement to be one of the secret sauces for life – whether it’s in the giving or receiving, everything tastes better. And when properly nourished, it’s so much easier to share the love. In trying to express my gratitude for my friend’s kind words this week, I hope I’ve taken a little bit of heart and passed it on. May we all tell someone just the thing they ought to hear about themselves.

Have you given or received encouragement this week? What does it look like for you?

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Confidence to Be Wrong

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“There is no better test of man’s integrity than his behavior when he is wrong.” – Marvin Williams

My dad was a very good apologizer. He had a favorite quip, “If you have to eat crow, eat it early when it’s tender.” When we sat down to talk in-depth when he was in his late 70’s, in what turned out to be his last couple of years before he died suddenly in a bike accident, he readily admitted his mistakes without defensiveness or blame.

For instance, in the 1980’s, the Presbyterian church adopted the rule not to ordain gay ministers and my dad went along with that policy in the churches he led. When I talked with him about it in 2012, he said, “I was wrong.” He didn’t try to hide behind the policy of the church overall or explain it away because the fear about AIDS at the time.  He told me, “You learn in ministry that you move to the problem, not away from the problem. When a problem arises, that’s the same issue you mentioned with procrastination. When an issue arises, you jump in and if you are going to get beat up, get beat up right away. Don’t wait til later. If you have to apologize and ask for forgiveness, do it quick.”

But I hadn’t put together his willingness to admit he was wrong with confidence until Dr. Gerald Stein put it together for me in a comment he made on the Airing the Wounds Out post. He said, “Confidence and acceptance play into the surrendering of the desire to rebut every criticism.”

The confidence to be wrong. The ability to lean in to what we haven’t done well and try to do better without contorting ourselves in all sorts of unnecessary shapes in order to try to avoid the blame. It seems to work on two levels.

The first is to lean in and keep us open to life. Our spiritual traditions speak to this idea. The Roman Catholics have confession. The Buddhists talk about egolessness as explained by Pema Chödrön,

“In the teachings of Buddhism, we hear about egolessness. It sounds difficult to grasp: what are they talking about, anyway? When the teachings are about neurosis, however, we feel right at home. That’s something we really understand. But egolessness? When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully – which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress – a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises – the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it’s not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness. It’s when all of our schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or punishment.”

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

I was in my mid-20’s when I cheated on the guy I was dating. When I eventually broke up with him, I didn’t tell him the truth when he asked if there was someone else. It wasn’t until 4 years later when he sent me an email that I finally told him. It didn’t make us fast friends, but it finally made us honest friends. I didn’t have the confidence to be truthful right away because I wanted so much to be liked and I did a lot of damage to us both in the meantime.

Which is a segue to the second part, to do it quickly. That’s advice that is also common in the high-tech world as a business strategy called failing fast. It refers to the strategy to identify ideas that don’t work quickly before you get too invested in them. It works because one of the things that undercuts our confidence is rumination and overthinking. When we get caught up in the cycle of second-guessing and reviewing where we went wrong, we move out of action and into our heads. Authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman explain:

“Failing fast allows for constant adjustment, testing and then quick movement toward what will actually work. The beauty is that when you fail fasts, or early, you have a lot less to lose. Usually you are failing small, rather than spectacularly. And you have a lot to gain from learning as you fail.”

The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

As I discovered from watching my dad, it takes a lot of courage to be wrong. But when you can do it well, it actually builds confidence because we do it quickly, stay open and can move on.

This is my 7th post on confidence. The others are:

I Can

Fear and Confidence

Growth Mind-set

Bossy Pants – Confidence and Leadership

No Name Calling

Speaking Up

(featured photo from Pexels)