# 9 - He Was Trembling, but Spoke to the Crowd Anyway
Episode 9
Welcome. I'm Rick Lewis. This is Episode Nine of The Follow Through Formula Podcast and I’m feeling pretty good today. The last eight days of one episode a day and my commitment to do a daily podcast have been sort of up and down, and I'm sure I'll hit some other points that might be a little more difficult, but today I'm feeling good.
What I want to talk about today is one of six hidden obstacles that consistently block people from making life leaps or from making large, positive change, or pursuing goals that matter to them. I detail all six of these hidden obstacles in my Follow Through Formula Roadmap guide, as well as the six corresponding resources that you need in order to overcome those obstacles at gamesforconfidence.com/roadmap.
Today I am going to talk about obstacle number six in the road map. Number six is: Trying to Change Alone. Trying to change all by ourselves. We've been raised in what I would call a hero culture. This culture has trained us to believe we will get more admiration or glory or credit if we do things all in our own. We also feel we will be better protected emotionally from the expectations, the demands, or the disappointments of others when we make change efforts in private.
Personally, being a lone wolf type myself, this has been a big stumbling block for most of my life. It has always been very difficult for me to reach out and ask for help. This podcast, while I am giving something of value to others, is actually a way of me asking for help. This is me openly saying I want to create and facilitate a community conversation about pursuing what matters most, and I need the help of people who are willing to dive in and have this conversation with me and work on the competencies that allow them to triumph in this manner, which will be a new invitation for other people to want to join in as well.
So, the sixth obstacle I mention in the roadmap is this tendency to want to do things alone, while the resource we need to move past this obstacle is partnership.
I've been getting some really wonderful feedback about the previous episodes of this podcast. People love the stories, of course. So today I want to tell you a story that has to do with the power of the vulnerability of asking for help. I've mentioned on some previous episodes that for a period of about 10 years I made my living as a street performer, doing street shows, gathering a crowd in public, just impromptu, creating a big enough crowd and giving away enough of a wonderful experience that people would pay me for it at the end, often quite well. People would just put a cash donation in my hat. Cash is something that's disappearing these days, but back when I was doing this in the eighties and mid-nineties, cash was in plentiful supply. People actually had coins and bills in their wallet. I would street perform all the time and I would pass my hat and I could make some substantial money from a single street show, especially on busy, sunny days in Granville Island Market in Vancouver, BC.
I'd set up, do my show, really milk it and draw it out. I’d give my best stuff for an hour and at the end I would get on top of this 12 ft tall unicycle I had. That was the finale of my show, getting on top of a 12 ft high unicycle. But the only way I could get on that unicycle was getting 12 volunteers out of the audience to come up and hold onto this unicycle, hold it upright.
Imagine a seat on top of a pole 12 ft up in the air and four people holding that pole, then a big rope over the top of the seat and four people holding that rope off to the side on each side of the unicycle, and then me doing a tight rope walk up the rope to the seat 12 ft in the air and riding it. That was the finality of my show.
I worked on and developed and refined the street show over many years, and it just got better and better. And I found out what thrilled people, what they loved, what was great entertainment for them. I got to the point where I was making really good money, substantially good money. And if you imagine how much could be made in a street show, I won't say exactly, but it's probably more probably than you are even imagining. I got really good at this.
One day I was at Granville Island—it was one of these perfect summer days, and I was looking forward to a couple of shows I had been scheduled for at one of the most lucrative spots. There are several spots for street shows on Granville Island, but there is one main spot where you could gather the biggest crowds and make the best money at that time. Following my first show, a woman who was in the audience came up to me as I was holding my hat. I had just done my hat pitch and asked for money.
It is such a fun feeling to have a crowd of hundreds of people converge on you with cash and put it right in your hat! This was a regular experience for me at that time. This woman came up, she gave me a donation, and then she jokingly asked me if I wanted to donate all the money I had just made to help her replace a hot water heater in her house that had unexpectedly burst and flooded her basement while she had been on vacation. So, you know, we talked and joked for a few minutes about that. Of course, I didn't give her all the money in my hat. But as she walked away, an idea took root in my mind.
I decided to experiment with this idea during my second performance.
I did my usual show, but after collecting donations at the end, I announced to the audience that I was going to give someone in the crowd a chance to win all the money that I collected at the end of the show. I did the hat pitch and I let people come forward. And then I said, “Don't go away because all of this money that you're giving to me right now, I'm going to give away!” I said, “Anyone can win this money. All you have to do is come up in front of the crowd and give a 32 second speech on behalf of your plan or dream and describe how you would use this cash.” Then I said, “Everybody here is gonna vote on who is the most worthy recipient of the money.”
When I asked for volunteers who wanted to come up to try and speak on behalf of winning the money, at least 100 hands instantly shot into the air and we're talking about 700 to 800 people! I went around and I selected 20 people at random and invited them up onto the stage. I got them lined up shoulder to shoulder. There were men, women, and kids. So I started at one end and I handed the microphone to the small boy who was at that end, and he took the microphone and he shouted out, “I think I should get all the money because if you give it to me, I could get a lot of candy!” Everybody laughed, and I was feeling the delight of having tried this new idea, and there being such energy behind it. I was anticipating all the fun that was about to come from listening to these 20 volunteers contesting for the cash. Then something unexpected happened.
One by one, the microphone was passed along, and instead of being more entertained, the crowd got more and more focused and silent.
They became riveted on each individual, many of whom were quite nervous about being in front of an awed audience that was listening to them take the risk of speaking about their cause. Some of the people talked about charities. They volunteered for organizations they believed in. Passionate petitions were made for the homeless, the hungry, single mothers, nonprofits with real visions.
The further down the line we got, the more each person brought to his or her appeal. Finally, we came to the last participant, clearly a blue collar worker who was in overalls with kind of unkempt hair. It made me think of this statistic that's often repeated, which is that when they do polls about what people fear most, fear of speaking in public ranks higher than the fear of death. The look on this man's face was a demonstration of that statistic. My guess was he had never spoken in public before in his entire life. Yet something motivated him to take a place on stage and attempt to convince this very big gathering of complete strangers why he should get all the money that was waiting in my hat.
I handed him the microphone, and he quietly began telling us about his grown son, who months earlier had suffered a really bad injury. His son had been out of work for months, really scraping to get by. He explained that his son was just several hundred dollars short of the money he needed for an operation that would get him back to work. This distraught and troubled father spoke not just for his son, but he was talking about his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren, this family of his son’s, and how they were struggling based on his son's injury. Now, the cause that he was speaking on behalf of, it wasn't any greater than that of the other people on stage. But this man's whole body was trembling. You could literally see his knees shaking. His voice was quavering. He was so nervous about making this public appeal.
It was completely clear that no one else who spoke that day risked themselves with more vulnerability than he did.
After he was done, I turned back to the audience and we went down the line one by one, and I had people clap and cheer for the person that they thought should get the money. I could tell, even as I went down the line, everyone was holding on to the very end. When I got to this last man and said, “How many people think this man should get the money?” the audience was unanimous. They completely went through the roof with cheering and applause. I mean, people were just like, “Go give him the money!” It actually chokes me up when I think about this guy again, and the courage that he had. I haven't told the story in a while. This happened 20 years ago, and I can still see him. He had a level of bravery, asking for help on behalf of someone else, he had such innocence and simplicity and it just translated. Everybody wanted to help this man. You could tell that underneath was this proud, hard-working father who had to overcome his own deeply ingrained habit of remaining independent by honestly and directly asking for help.
I'm so glad I thought of this story because it's really opening something up in me. What I'm doing here is asking for help, by putting these podcasts out daily around this conversation about us pursuing what matters most; by talking about the fear that is in between us and that which we most want; by talking about how we keep letting the fear stop us and how we keep allowing culture to supply us with endless degrees of distraction and product and entertainment that we willingly engage in instead of taking that risk to do what we love, instead of talking about what we love and asking for help to make something happen that we believe so strongly in. That's all I'm doing here.
I love talking to people about this subject because when I talk about it every once in a while, somebody lights up and somebody connects into that thing that they want or have always wanted or that they want now or some big change that they're up against and they light up and they get this reference point for knowing it is actually possible. They realize, “Hey, the only reason it has not been possible is because I haven't been willing to take the risk. I haven't been willing to be big enough, or to make a visible enough commitment, and risk rejection or judgment or failure.”
But the thing we know about human beings and all the stories we hear about various protagonists who have accomplished big things in their lives, every single one of these stories has a phase of the story where the person fails or fails repeatedly or works at something for a very long time and doesn't really get traction until they've stuck with it for weeks or months or years.
And then they break through because it mattered to them enough to keep going. That's what this podcast is about.
That's what The Follow Through Formula is about as a course, and the Life Leap community that surrounds it. The community is key. That's why this course is embedded inside of the community. It is a forum where we come together and we don't let each other back away or lose hope. We can't do this alone. Our failure to address the things that matter most to us is a cultural, because we're unconsciously helping each other in the wrong direction. We’re unconsciously helping each other to forget what matters most and indulge in all the available distractions and excuses and reasons for not thinking big about what's possible.
The Life Leap community is going to be the opposite. It's a place where we remind ourselves about what matter matters most, and we know that the whole purpose of being there as a community is to make those leaps and to not let each other play small. That's my passion. That's my vision for this project. It's why I'm doing this podcast every single day despite everything that keeps coming up for me: “Is this really gonna work?” and, “Do people really care?” and, “How many downloads were there yesterday?” and when there are fewer downloads of the podcast, thinking, “Ok, maybe I should stop doing this.” I mean, I'm telling you, all these thoughts go through my mind, but because I know the nature of where they are coming from, I'm just letting them be there, I just stick with this commitment. And I want the same for you.
Whatever it is that you're looking to pursue, I want to support you in that. And I can support you to a certain extent through just what I'm speaking here each day. But if you are willing to come forward and talk about what you are working on, to ask for direct help or to take the course and be part of the community, you can take a step that is going to be hugely beneficial, not just to you, but to this project that I'm describing. Because I can't do it with just me.
The vision here is to reverse the cultural context of playing small, to create a pod of people who are internalizing a different conversation and a different way of being in the world.
And if we have a whole bunch of people who are doing that all at once, then each of those people, when they go out and live their lives, they're going to come in contact with other people who are going to feel the difference in how they're being, and they're going to want some of that, and that's going to rub off on them. That's what I want. I want to create a collective that has an impact on the world around us and reverses this cultural conversation.
Well, there you go. I think that's good enough for today. So again, this specific podcast episode is about the willingness to be in partnership and to ask for help, to be supported for your big life leap, and to break the hidden rule of being independent and trying to change alone. The invitation is to trust other human beings to rope up and go there together.
If you want to get the roadmap, you just go to gamesforconfidence.com/roadmap and you can download the whole thing. You'll see all six of these hidden obstacles and all six of the resources that you need. The Follow Through Formula Course and Life Leap Community are set up there as well, so you can get those resources, too. You don't have to join to get value from this roadmap. The roadmap will help you. So please go get it. And then if you want to join in with the course and/or the community, that would be wonderful. And, if you already know what that thing is that you're pursuing, remember that the 21 day challenge I started way back in the first episode is still alive. What small action can you take today that will move your goal or your vision forward? What is it? It can be as small as you want.
When you take any small step, you're shifting your whole physiological and neurological habit.
I rejoice every time somebody takes that risk and says, “Yep. I want to play this game!” Thanks again for listening. This has been Episode Nine.
I'm Rick Lewis. Whoever you are, I wish you the absolute best on your journey. I'll be back at you tomorrow with Episode 10. Have a wonderful day and…Game on!