I’ve had a few people tell me lately that I’m “one of the most fearless people they know”. Gulp. Part of me is flattered and wants to wrap that description around me like a colourful jacket and wear it proudly as I strut down the street. But part of me is completely uncomfortable accepting that moniker. It just doesn’t fit the real Heather I know deep in the hidden parts of me.

Sure, outwardly I do a fair number of things that might appear “fearless” to some. I took great delight in jumping out of a plane when I turned 40 (as you can see in the above picture). I’ve wandered in parts of the globe where few North Americans will ever set foot. I’ve taken pictures of gun-toting rebels in Ethiopia. I’ve slept in a tent on a farm in Kenya. I’ve stayed in bed-bug-infested hovels in Bangladesh where wild dogs sang me to sleep (or, I should say, howled me awake). I’ve para-sailed in Mexico. I’ve back-packed in the Rockies with a bell hanging from my pack to warn the bears. I’ve climbed on top of a bus in Tanzania to get good photos of lions 20 feet away (lions that could have bounded over that bus faster than I could say “oops – shoulda stayed INSIDE the bus”).

It all looks rather fearless, if you line up all of those adventures and stitch them onto my jacket like Girl Scout patches, but if you look a little closer at that picture at the top of this post, you’ll see the undeniable truth. That’s fear written all over my face, plain and simple. Yup, I was terrified. Even questioned my own sanity when the plane door opened.  But I’m kind of stubborn and more than a little bit proud, and I wasn’t about to admit that I was too afraid to do it, so I jumped.  And OH MY GOSH am I glad I did! 

The thing is, I was raised in a family of adventure-junkies.  All four of us siblings would rather take an adventure over a material possession almost any day. Offer us something exciting to do, and we’ll all be out of our chairs so fast our spouses barely have time to shake their heads and give each other that knowing glance that’s their universal sign for “the Plett siblings are at it AGAIN!”

But this post isn’t really about all the times I’ve managed to conquer the fear and do it anyway. No, this post is about the times I had no right to wear that jacket or accept the Girl Scout badges. This post is about the many ways that fear has limited my life.

In some really important ways, I feel like I’m the most fearful kitten in the litter, hovering in the corner of the room, hoping that the big hand swooping in will be gentle, but almost certain that it will not. Sometimes I even hiss like that little kitten, mustering up all the courage I can to send the big scary dragon back to where it came.

This year, I’ve been dealing with a lot of that fear.  At the end of last year, I’d had a growing realization that fear was limiting me in far too many ways and it was starting to feel really, really icky. I was being held prisoner by my fear dragon.

I was afraid people wouldn’t like me, so I made decisions that wouldn’t offend anyone. It’s kind of hard being a manager who never makes unpopular decisions, but I was trying my hardest.  Mostly I was accepting mediocrity and my team wasn’t growing because I wasn’t challenging people to try harder and I wasn’t standing up to bullies.  I was just trying to make sure everyone on the team got along, and ironically it meant that nobody was really getting along because nobody was hearing how their behavior was affecting people and excellence wasn’t really being expected of anyone. The team was stuck in old patterns and I was enabling them by being too afraid to address it.

Beyond the fear of not being liked, one of my biggest fears was failure, so I wasn’t taking some of the risks I wanted so desperately to take (in work or personal life).  Even though I longed to be an artist, I hadn’t ever tried to paint because it felt scary and overwhelming and I didn’t know who to ask to help me and I didn’t want to admit how chicken I was.  I hadn’t tried yoga because I had too many memories of how clutzy I’d been in aerobics or jazz dance classes and didn’t want to make a fool of myself again.  Even though I’d been writing for years, I wasn’t always writing from my most authentic truth because I was afraid of what people would think of me and afraid I wouldn’t be able to take the criticism when they didn’t agree.

So when the new year came, I knew it was time to do something about the fear dragon. Even though I knew I would never be truly fearless (in fact, everyone needs some fear because it tells us we’re alive and passionate and it helps guide our paths), I chose “fearless” as my word for the year.  In retrospect, I probably should have chosen “courage”, as I knew from my sky-diving experience that it’s not about not having fears, it’s about feeling the fear but doing it anyway.  But I stuck with “fearless”.

First, I created a little video montage to mark the beginning of the journey, and then I started chipping away at my fears one by one.  I took my first watercolour class. I signed up for yoga at the local fitness club. I learned to release my daughters into their own bold lives. I laid my soul bare in a frighteningly authentic way in front of my staff team. I put some more of my writing and art and creativity out into the world (including this website).

It’s been good and rewarding in so many ways, but I won’t lie to you – it has also been really, really hard. Sometimes it seems like every dragon we conquer reveals an even bigger dragon hiding just behind it.  I started painting, for example, and fell in love with it, but then people wanted copies of my paintings to hang in public places and one person even asked me to participate in a charity art exhibit. Yikes! Was I really ready to open myself up to critique? What if nobody liked my art?

One of the really big fears I’m still dealing with involves my leadership experience.  This has been a rocky journey for me lately, and the dragons just keep getting bigger.  After being really honest about my fears and failures with my team, it seemed like everyone responded really well and things got better for a while.  But then things started slipping again and even bigger problems started emerging.  Was I ready to conquer these dragons too?

Gradually I’m facing more and more of those dragons. When it came time for annual performance reviews, for example, I was much more honest than I’d been in the past.  But that led to some hurt feelings and even anger, and my first instinct was to brush it under the rug and pretend it wasn’t there.

I wish I had a nice simple way to wrap this up, but I don’t.  Today, though I’ve conquered some of the dragons, others feel even bigger than ever and there are more things to be afraid of.  And the truth is, I’m ready to walk away from some of these leadership challenges, but my fear of failure is telling me “you can’t do it! Imagine what people will say when you’re gone! You have to SUCCEED!”

But one way or another, I have to face these dragons. I do not want to end the year on a fearful note.  Whether I need to admit defeat or find a way to forge ahead, I have to do it with courage.  With God and my community (that’s you, dear readers!) on my side, I will carry on.

 Are you with me, dragon-slayers and sky-divers?

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