Episode 10

Greetings, my fellow Life Leapers! This is Rick Lewis with Episode 10 of The Follow Through Formula Podcast. I'm trying something a little bit different today. I have been recording each episode near the end of the day, getting most of my daily tasks done first and then moving on with recording the episode and then uploading it in the evening. But it is the morning today, and I thought I'd just try jumping in, offering some thoughts that just came up right in the moment. Rather than overthink it, I just nipped in here to my little sound booth in the bathroom, which now has moved into the shower.

We have a bathroom in the downstairs level of our house which is relatively unused, so I have converted the bathroom into my recording studio and have now moved it into the shower stall. I'm standing inside a shower stall that is covered with thick blankets because it's a place where I get the best sound masked from outside environmental noise.

So that's where I'm standing right now. I've just hopped in here to do say something about healing. When we don’t attend to what matters most to us, it leaves us with a kind of wound. It's a kind of psychic soul wound, because an important part of us is not receiving the food of our committed, bold action. That part of us needs to be actively engaged with it in order to be fed, even if it's only through small, bold action. And when we don't, it's a kind of wound.

The good news is the healing of that wound does not depend on what results come from the action you take on its behalf. The healing does not depend on what comes back, who responds, who lights up or says yes, or what happens to your finances or your relationships or anything else.

What matters most is the effort.

I spent a couple of days crafting invitation messages to my subscribers, to join me in the Life Leap Community and to take The Follow Through Formula Course. I'm noticing that I am uplifted by making the offer itself. I am buoyed and energized by declaring what it is that I'm about, what I want to do, what's most important to me. Whether or not people take me up on the offer is not even important at this point. Of course, that would be wonderful. That's an eventual goal that I'll keep pursuing because doing this together in community and getting the help from others to make this whole vision move forward is essential. But taking the steps and taking the action to invite people in and to articulate what it is I care about is aligning me and making me feel more upright, more open eyed, and actually creating some immunity to the fear I've been holding on to that people won't say yes.

The fear has been there, that if I put it out there and no one says yes, I'll feel deflated and depressed and disheartened. But actually I feel the opposite right now. I just sent out another email and I came right down to record this podcast. I don't even know if anyone's responding to it, but it doesn't matter because I'm moving forward with the offer. It ties in with the podcast that I did on how I survived public humiliation, Episode Three. I told the story of my first street show, where I went out with this big vision to be a street performer and did my first show, but got absolutely zero response and zero support or appreciation for my efforts. But the effort itself was a point of breakthrough for me because in the offering of it, I realized I loved it. I just kept going and I figured out how to make street performing work for me, and I actually made my living as a street performer after that for a period of about 10 years, just from donations directly into my hat.

I'm in the same situation right now. I'm clarifying for myself what I want to do now. I want to help people to be able to take action on what matters most to them in their lives. And it's what I'm experimenting with myself right now. I'm up against all of these hurdles that come up and block and stop that kind of bold, brave action, and I'm navigating through it and I'm learning and finding the leverage points where I can keep my traction and keep moving forward regardless of the immediate results, trusting and knowing that if I stick with it and I keep going, the results are going to come eventually. The right people who want to do this work will come.

In my corporate keynotes I've pointed out that there are two forms of stress disease. The first form of stress disease comes from overdoing the wrong kinds of stress. This is a commonly understood problem. If you type in your search bar phrases like “reduce stress” or “stress problems,” you're going to get a huge amount of content addressing the debilitating results of too much stress. Too much stress is what gets all the attention when we think about stress. We think of it as something we need to reduce or get rid of.

But another form of stress disease that is not talked about has to do with too little stress.

This tends to get overshadowed by the idea of too much stress. What I mean by too little stress is that we avoid these little actions, these little steps that we ought to be moving toward. These small actions are an engagement of a certain type of stress, a positive form of stress that is actually healthy. That's how we grow. In fact it's the only way we grow. If we look at kids and watch what they do, we see this demonstrated. Human beings grow by moving toward things that are uncertain, and in some cases even unsafe when it comes to kids. That's why parents are there to keep them from jumping off the roof with a sheet over their head that they're going to use is a parachute!

As adults we have built up a lot of conditioning around being careful and not making mistakes. Over time, we stop taking new kinds of action, micro actions that move us forward, allowing us to learn and grow by taking intelligent risks and failing some of the time. Too little of this kind of stress, this kind of natural risk-taking, turns out to be very detrimental to us. 

There are a multitude of ways we can go about avoiding the challenges that would allow us to stretch and grow. We can construct our lives in such a way that we don't have to face those challenges—we don't have to talk to that person who makes us uncomfortable, we don't have to stand up and speak before a group, or we don't have to take up the challenge of tending to our health, or we make ourselves super busy so we don't have time to exercise. There are all sorts of ways, unconsciously, we avoid things that are difficult or a stretch for us. What happens in that process is that our lives shrink. What activities we can participate in, what fields we can engage in, what our relationships look like, those things get smaller and smaller and smaller until later in life we look around and wonder, “Why am I not happy? Why don't I feel full of meaning and purpose? Why am I not satisfied with what happens to me in the course of a day? Why do I go to bed and put my head on my pillow and just feel a feeling of, What was that? What did I actually get done today?”

The reason we are left feeling that way is because we have circumvented the kind of stress that we actually need, the healthy stress of growth.

At every stage of life there is a kind of growth that can occur, there are changes that occur which we are designed to learn from. Every change necessitates a growth of being, and when we are not following through on that growth, we know deep down that something is not working. Even if everything else in our outer lives seems to be functioning well, without that sense of intelligent risk that produces growth we actually experience another kind of stress that is not healthy. We may even experience anxiety and powerlessness and depression. A great amount of the distress we feel may be caused by too little action, too little stress of the right kind. My vision of the Life Leap Community and The Follow Through Formula Course is to support you to engage in the right kind of stress, what I call intelligent misbehavior, which leads to a life of natural and joyful growth, no matter what your circumstances.

This community is about supporting one another to keep moving forward, and to live from a context of small but courageous actions based on what matters the most to us.

Alright, that's it for today. This has been Episode Ten. When I first started this daily podcast it felt like a giant commitment, and it still feels pretty big. But here I am on Day 10, early in my day, and I've just taken this significant action on behalf of my goal and it's done. I'm getting some facility, some momentum just because I'm doing it every single day. So, I remind you of the challenge that I put before you when I started this 21 day challenge. What's something that you want to pursue in your life? What are you going for and what small action can you take each and every day? Make it as small as you want! The important part is that you are taking some kind of step towards your goal. I'm here to support you. If you want to talk to me directly, send me an email. I'd be happy to engage in any way you like. If you've got questions or wins to share or an inspiration you want to float my way, don't hesitate. Thanks for listening in, and I will see you tomorrow! Or you'll hear me tomorrow—I won't see you, nor will I even hear you. I'll just imagine you sitting out there listening to this podcast, and pretending there's a crowd just benefiting from this! And if it ain't so, or if it is: Game on!