How much of your life do you spend in your comfort zone? That area where everything around you is in the right place, moving at the right speed, functioning the way it should. Many people might consider this their happy place. You are in complete control. The comfort zone may feel like you’re lounging in your backyard pool. Lying in an inner tube on a sunny, summer afternoon. You’re holding a lemonade in your hand and you’re flicking your toes in the water.
Your mind has emptied all its thoughts except…you take one sip of your lemonade, look around and wonder…are there sharks in here with me? Then the fear sets in.
Welcome to Swimming in the Flood; a podcast where we develop the resilient leader’s mindset by navigating difficult currents in business. My name is Trent Theroux.
Paul Gower, in his book The Psychology of Fear, writes that fear is a normal human emotional reaction – it is a built-in survival mechanism with which we are all equipped. Fear is a reaction to danger that involves both the mind and body. It serves a protective purpose – signaling us of danger and preparing us to deal with it.
Quick show of hands, how many of you have felt abject fear? My magic mirror tells me that everyone has their hand up at least a little. Fear is normal and natural. The moment we step out of our comfort zone we enter the fear zone. And, it’s scary.
I was only half joking about fearing sharks, because one of the most fearful moments in my life involved fear of sharks. In 2012, I attempted to swim from Point Judith, RI to Block Island, RI, a small island about 12 miles off RI’s southern coast into the Atlantic.
This was my first charity swim and I was attempting to swim the entire distance backstroke as a sign of solidarity for those with spinal cord injuries. The surf was atrociously rough because Hurricane Leslie was due to approach the next day.
My support team consisted of two boats that were coming from a Marina about five miles away and a kayaker, who was starting at the shore with me. Two minutes before the start of the swim, we saw the two boats moving into position. We called them and confirmed that they could see us.
It was low tide. The rocky shoreline was yielding to six foot waves crashing every few seconds. My kayaker wanted to find a safer point of entry as he was concerned that one of the waves would flip him onto the rocks. Me, I already had a long day of swimming in front of me and wanted to take as straight of a line as possible to the island.
The surf was ferocious. With every crashing wave, I went to the bottom to hold onto a barnacle encrusted rock to protect myself from being washed back to the shore. It took nearly twenty minutes of dive, hold, pop back up, a couple more strokes and repeat. My hands and chest developed cuts from the sharp barnacles.
Finally making it past the surf break I looked around, but didn’t see either boat nor the kayaker. I rationalized this by thinking that I hadn’t gone deep enough out for the boats. Simple reasoning. I took one look for the island in the horizon and created a straight line to the lighthouse that I just left and started swimming backstroke. To maintain course, I keep the lighthouse between my toes. It was a trick I learned through the hundreds of hours of ocean swimming I had done to prepare for this event.
I settled into an easy cadence and stroked away. On long swims, I typically have a playlist in my head. Today, I settled on starting with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Now, I’m going to stop for a second while you wipe that coffee you just spit up off your face. Yes, Saturday Night Fever. I love disco. I love the Bee Gees. “And if I lose you now, I think I would die, Oh, say you’ll always be my baby…” Sorry got carried away. Anyway, I swam to the Bee Gees.
For as much as I love the Bee Gees every now and then the needle skips and you can’t get a song’s phrase out of your head. An earworm. That happened to me when I got stuck on “If I can’t have you.” I took a quick check of my watch and noticed that we were now one hour into my swim. An hour. I took a look around and couldn’t see my boats or the kayaker…anywhere.
Instantly, I left the comfort of a casual morning swim, into a panic of being alone in the Atlantic Ocean. The waves had increased making Block Island impossible to see. A feeling of dread washed over me. What did I get myself into? Even though I was a highly accomplished swimmer, the circumstances made me seriously doubt my ability to even make the two miles back to where I started. That’s when I started thinking about the sharks.
The sharks were part of our planning. They migrate through these waters during September. That’s why I was going to have the protection of two boats. And, we knew that they feed at dusk and dawn, coinciding with my sunrise departure. Again, that’s what the boats are for. But now, I’m freakin’ bleeding. We didn’t make an open wound contingency in our planning.
Constant listeners, you can hear that I clearly entered the fear zone. So what can we as developing resilient leaders learn from this type of paralyzing fear, whether it’s from imagined sharks or taking on a challenging and risky project for the first time?
I am now going to give you my unscientific, non-peer reviewed, resilient leader theory on overcoming the fear zone. Are you ready? Got your pencils out? Here’s it is. Start stroking again. You heard it. Start Stroking Again.
The theory is simple. Here’s how it works. First, I know you appreciate that this is a metaphor. I am not encouraging you to start swimming with sharks while sporting open wounds.
In her book, Danger in the Comfort Zone, Judith Bardwick writes, “The comfort zone is a behavioral state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviors to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.”
That sounds a lot like where I was right up until the one-hour time check, then I left this comfort zone and moved into what is referred to as the fear zone. Maybe you’ve experienced this in your work? You’re moving along with something you’ve done a thousand times only to land somewhere you’ve never been? Sure. It makes you uncertain whether you should move forward and complete the project or not because there’s a fear of, “what if I do something wrong?” Or, “I’ve never done this before.” And then you worry about the repercussions.
So, is the fear a good thing? Jeff Bezos wrote in his 1998 letter to shareholders, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.” Bezos is not suggesting that we are afraid of the dark or horror movies. Rather, he is telling us that we should be just outside our comfort zones.
What Bezos is telling people follows The Yerkes-Dodson Law. The Yerkes-Dodson Law is an empirical relationship between pressure and performance. The law shows that as pressure gets applied it has a positive effect on performance…up to a point. Beyond the apex of the performance curve, the law shows that performance not only declines, but people will actually start to hide from the pressure.
A simple example of this is someone (like the author of this podcast nearly every week) who is up against a deadline. Have you ever felt a little more energized, more heightened awareness as a deadline approaches? Why? The fear of missing the deadline stimulates our minds and bodies to perform at a higher level because we are nervous of the consequences. This is a feeling that we all have felt and is natural in each of us.
How does our theory apply? Treading water in the Atlantic I had three choices; flight, fight or freeze. Flight – head back to the safety of the lighthouse. Fight – move forward toward the island and my goal. Freeze – stay right here and literally freeze in the cold water. Start stroking again. When you reach this point of fear, we must convince ourselves to start stroking again. When we are struck with fear of a project, we need to start stroking again. You made it this far into the deep ocean. You will make it to the island.
And to give you something to remember this theory here’s my good friend from the Australian waters, Dory.
Folks, thank you for listening to Swimming in the Flood. Resilient leaders face challenging currents and it is tough navigating, but with one tack or another we can get there together.