The Guts To Get In The Car
Podcast: Download (Duration: 8:48 — 8.1MB)
I played Little League for 8 years as a kid.
Loved it.
Funny thing is; I loved it never having been on a winning team. I was dead last every year.
Alright, wipe the smirk off your face; I wasn’t the reason I was never on a winning team.
Actually, I was pretty good. My first year, I was with the Indians. We were terrible. We never even got a run until one practice our coach told us we wouldn’t score until we hit the ball. Heck, up to that point, none of us would even swing at the ball! At our next game, I remembered the coach’s advice, and swung at a pitch. I connected! It was awesome! We still didn’t win, but my hit broke things open and we started scoring. For just the briefest of moments I loved being the hero that got the first hit. But within seconds all the attention got my alarms going off and I was ready to fade into the background again.
Over the next eight years that same scene was repeated many times. I was good, and loved the game. But every time I made a good play, I was simultaneously elated and terrified by the attention. By the time I grew out of Little League and reached high school, my fear won out and I chose the safety and security of anonymity.
Early on in my freshman PE class, we worked on track and field events. Without realizing it, I blew away my classmates in the long jump far enough that my coach suggested I try out for the track team. He told me I could be a real competitor with some training on my technique. His encouragement really got me fired up to go out for the team, so I worked my tail off for the next couple of months until track and field tryouts. On the day of the tryouts, I jumped on my bike early in the morning and raced for the stadium. When I got there I pulled up outside the gate and stopped to look at the crowd gathered on the football field.
Then I looked some more.
Then I slowly turned my bike around and rode back home.
I couldn’t bring myself to go through that gate.
Similar scenes played out all the way through high school including a half-hearted attempt to make the baseball team my junior year. Every baseball practice was spent embarrassed, terrified and subconsciously sabotaging my chances in order to insure a speedy escape in the first cuts. And I always saw myself as too scrawny to make the football team—despite spending every year lifting weights in Systematic Conditioning class. I ran into the coach in the locker room —after football season my senior year—he actually told me I had good size and asked me why I didn’t play.
Aaaagh!
For those of you with no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourselves very lucky.
For those who can relate to these feelings all too well, it’s time to leave the safety of obscurity and find the courage to face the truth. We’re wasting way too much of our lives simultaneously driven to succeed and yet terrified of success.
That’s right; it’s the fear of success not failure that holds us back. In I Could Do Anything, If I Only Knew What It Was, Barbara Sher does a great job covering this phenomenon. Amongst numerous examples, she describes the all too familiar scenario of the gifted person who’s given numerous golden opportunities only to stumble and fall just at the moment success is within reach. The reasons we stumble are as varied as we are. She offers some suggestions, but ultimately can’t tell me why I’ve done it and I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that it’s time we face down the enemy (ourselves) and find the courage to come out of hiding.
Jack Canfield, in The Success Principles, compares the way we live to driving a car with the emergency brake on. He makes the point that many of us go through life hanging on to negative self-images and preprogrammed comfort zones like psychological emergency brakes restraining our efforts to succeed. He goes on to suggest that rather than trying to exert more will power, like pressing harder on the gas pedal, we need to release the brakes and replace our current programming with more positive and productive attitudes that take us out of our comfort zones.
I’ll warn you right now; making progress will take a lot of research, critical self-analysis, painful honesty and a mountain of courage. Even in the midst of those high school experiences, I maintained a courageous façade. I didn’t really want to make those teams anyway. And while I got pretty good at convincing those around me, no one was more convinced of the validity of my excuses than me. I could regurgitate a long list of perceived successes to allay any of my doubts. My security lay in carefully choosing my battles, only confronting the challenges I knew were within my comfort zone.
No risk, no growth, no worries.
No more.
I refuse to burn up any more of my precious time avoiding real challenges and living within my self-made prison. I intend to see and be seen; to hear and be heard; to challenge and be challenged. I intend to let the world know I exist and bask in the glory of success or be refined in the fire of experience.
I love the scene in “Transformers” where Sam and Mikaela experience their first face-to-face communication with Bumblebee. Sam and Mikaela have just fought off Frenzy while Bumblebee was subduing Barricade. They discover that they can talk to Bumblebee and he can respond using sound bites from his radio. At the end of their exchange, Bumblebee transforms back into a Camaro, invites them in with an open door and says—using a John Wayne sound bite from “El Dorado” — “any more questions you wan’ta ask?” Sam says he thinks Bumblebee wants them to get in the car. Incredulous, Mikaela asks “and go where?” And the best part is Sam’s closing question to Mikaela…
“Fifty years from now when you look back at your life, don’t you wan’ta be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?”
Well…
…don’t you?
August 6th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I see you as a very courageous person – I’m glad you’re seeing it yourself. Look at where we are and from whence we’ve come… Wow. Thanks.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Go for it Garrett!
August 12th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Haha!! I thought I was the only one who sabotaged myself, busting up my chances for excellence so I could keep my head low. I had developed a whole mythology about why I had done it. Only now, decades later, am I beating the shame and getting into the game. And with blogs, self-publishing, and the new social pathways of the internet, there’s never been a better time.
Best wishes,
Jerry Waxler
Memory Writers Network
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:32 pm
[...] You know, he’s right. You give a kid enough encouragement while he’s a kid and there’ll be no stopping him when he’s an adult. So what kind of encouragement did I get as a kid? Did anyone tell me I was great? Yeah I can remember being told I was great. A lot of people told me I had a great voice. Like I said in The Interludes’ Coney Island Baby post, Kim and Michelle told me I had a good voice. Good enough that they didn’t give up until I joined choir. Then there was the day the football coach told me I had good size and should have played. [...]