Episode 7

Hi. This is Rick Lewis with the Follow Through Formula Podcast. This is episode number seven, a short week after I began this podcast. First, thank you to all of you who have been listening to the episodes and sending your support. It's definitely been and is still a leap of faith to be putting this out every day. But the messages I'm receiving back on the value it's providing, and the inspiration and movement folks are getting from it, makes every single bit of the effort worth it. I thank you so much for tuning in and listening to these episodes and subscribing and especially leaving reviews. It's having an effect in the iTunes search engine. The podcast is becoming more visible to more people. The downloads are increasing daily, and that is wonderful because my whole intention with this is to reach more ears with the follow through formula message about attending to what matters most in our lives.

I wanted to talk today about what I'm calling the number one fail point of follow through. Why don't we follow through? Why is it so common that we feel inspired to some new project or vision or a relationship with somebody that we want to build or grow or sustain, or even repair something, or make, even if we just are committing to carrying less extra weight around that. Whatever it is that we get these sparks of, or we see a door open and we're like, I want that. So why don't we follow through? In my own observation of my myself and others, here's the point at which I think we get stuck, which is pretty invisible. It seems pretty obvious in one way, but it's still hidden, and here's what I think it is.

I think the reason we don't follow through is because we don't commit, I mean, really commit to what it is we say we're going to do. That lack of commitment is represented by a weak articulation of the goal and of the nature of the commitment.

Language is so important and so powerful. If we don't put into words and say what we're going to do and by when we're going to do it, we vastly reduce our chances of following through because we haven't given ourselves clarity about what we're following through on and what we will be accountable for. We need to articulate with clear language what we say we're going to do and when that's going to happen.

First of all we need to articulate our commitment to ourselves in clear language because that gives us the operating instruction for what we're going to do, and it makes it measurable. And second of all, we need to use clear language when we communicate about it to other people as well. It's not always appropriate to go broadcasting to just anyone. But sometimes the commitment involves people, and sometimes we want to involve people because having other people be witness to our commitment helps us to be accountable to what it is we're bringing forth inside of ourselves.

Often we don’t commit, either to ourselves or to others, because we’re afraid of being trapped. There's a part of us that thinks if I make that commitment, what if things change, or what if I change my mind? There's something that instinctually feels scary about the idea of committing because it feels like we are limiting our options. We are wired to evolve and grow and change. We want to be unfolding and emerging into the new person we're supposed to be each day. We balk at making a commitment as though it would restrict our growth rather than encourage it. So what's the alternative?

We need to combine that commitment with the ability to course correct. We need to know that we're going to have to course correct all the way along.

When we make a commitment and we say, “This is what I'm going to do and this is by when I'm going to do it,” if we have to course correct, then we come up against a tremendous sense of vulnerability, a feeling of having failed to keep the commitment. If I stand up as I've done here and I said, I'm going to do 21 days of podcasting in a row, the reason I'm doing that is because it forces me to keep my attention on this conversation that is so important to me. And by committing to the podcast, I'm now drawn to do it each day because I've made that commitment to those of you who are listening and now getting enrolled in the importance of this conversation. But what happens if, on day 16 or day 19 or day 11, I totally lose the thread, or I can't think of anything to talk about, or I get sick or whatever happens. I know that's a possibility, so I've been very nervous about making that commitment.

I was listening to one of Brene Brown's podcasts, I believe it's called Unlocking Us. Brene Brown is brilliant, so there's a lot of really great stuff in her podcasts. She was talking about the shame workshops she used to run, and she described how in these workshops, which were three day workshops, the first day was always this kind of high because people were coming in and going, “Wow! We're going to do this very important work about shame and dealing with shame and getting past shame,” so the energy in the room was very positive and very high. And then the last day was the day where they had done some big work, and they're in the home stretch and everyone is feeling that kind of push to the finish line of this important work. But  she said day two was always hell.

Day two was always hell because that was where the real work was getting done. People were no longer in the honeymoon phase. You're far enough away from the start line and into the real work that you're kind of left out to sea on your own, figuring out how to get through it. And you're not close enough to the finish line to feel the push and the motivation to get through to the end. She said day two was so hard because when the real work was in front of you, every person unconsciously asked themselves, “How can I possibly get through this without being vulnerable? How can I get from where I am to where I need to go without getting vulnerable?”

And of course, the answer to that is you can't. You can't make that kind of big shift without being vulnerable. You can't transform yourself from the person who doesn't follow through to the person who does follow through without being vulnerable, and that all ties into this need to accept that we must commit. We have to open ourselves up to the possibility that we may not be able to fulfill our commitment, or that we're going to need to modify our commitment based on what reality feeds back to us after we make the commitment. That’s a more vulnerable position than hanging back being noncommittal.

Follow through is a conversation with reality, and the beginning of that conversation is started by us, through our commitment.

We say to reality, “Here's my commitment,” and then either immediately or over time reality responds to our statement of commitment. It's a back and forth, a give and take. We make our statement of commitment and then we listen. What is reality saying back? Maybe reality says, “That doesn't work for me that you're going to work 15 hours a day every single day and not spend any time with your kid,” or, “That doesn't work for me that you're gonna push yourself so hard exercising to get in shape that you actually break down and undermine your physical stamina rather than build it up.”

We have to have this conversation, but it is vulnerable because we don’t know what we are going to get back and we might have to shift. That vulnerability is part of the reason why we don't make the commitment and therefore cannot follow through.

A week ago I put out there that I want to build this community, to bring a group of people together, to work on this issue and support each other to be able to follow through, to learn how to have the conversation with reality about our commitments and to dance with that so there's magic in our lives, so we're growing and unfolding. I made that commitment in clear language. I've got the sales page up for it. And a few days later, nobody had done anything. I didn't get any response. There were no sign ups. I have a couple possible ways to engage on that page and I got nothing.

Nothing came back and so I said, “All right, I might have to modify what I'm doing.” This may not work, but what I'm committed to is to continuing to have the conversation. My job is not to make results happen. My job is not to make people sign up. It's to be as authentic and committed as possible to what I see is needed for me and other human beings and then be patient and see what happens.

Then in the last few days, people are beginning to sign up for the course. People are actually coming in the door and saying, I want to do this work and I want to do it in community. I'm ready, let's go. And that's thrilling to me! That's so exciting. It's very gratifying to have people listening to these ideas in the podcast in and of itself. But to say, Yeah, let's do this work together. I'm just thrilled about that. I was doubting, I was wavering, and yet I'm still listening. On one hand, I'm staying with my process and I will course correct if I need to. But the course correction at this point is going to happen once other human beings enter the frame of this conversation.

What we're going to do in this very first launch of the course and in the community is I'm going to be listening to you about what you need. I've got a lot of tools and I've got a lot of background and ways I can support you to learn how to follow through consistently. But everything I offer is going to be up for feedback and modification. What works, and especially in this very first group, which is going to be crucial, is that we're going be in this together and figuring out as we go what are the most useful resources and reference points and knowledge and education that you need to be able to do this.  

This is where I want to tell you another story. For those of you who have been listening along, you know that in my previous life as entertainer and speaker for corporate events, I do an act where I dress identically to the serving staff and I pose as a waiter who gets more and more odd and eccentric over the course of the meal and turns out to be the surprise keynote speaker. It's a very fun, funny, interesting piece of theater that catches people off guard. And then we get to talk about what just happened. How did you respond to this unusual circumstance?

This story is about something that happened years ago. I was doing the waiter routine for an association that was based around psychiatry and the event was being attended by about 300 professionals in the field of mental health, most of whom were actual psychiatrists. There I was, going table to table over filling water glasses and tripping and falling down with stuff and trying to take people's food away just as they had barely started on their meal. I was being completely eccentric, not in any way aggressive, violent, dangerous, just odd as can be.

I was going around all of these tables full of psychiatrists, and I could see the looks on their faces. By the end of that meal, most of the audience had a clinical diagnosis for my condition. Never in the history of humanity has any one person been subject to as much free diagnosis is I got over the course of that meal. They weren't saying it to me out loud, but I could see them tabulating. I could see their wheels turning, trying to figure out, “Okay, what's happening with this dude here?”

I went through the whole meal this way as I usually do. When I do this routine, my last blunder usually involves tripping over a tray of metal plate warmer covers. I put out a tray stand with metal plate warmer covers, and I pretend to blunder into it so that all these metal covers go flying. I fall down on the floor, the metal plate covers air making a big racket, and then I make a big production of trying to get myself up off the floor and collect all the things that I've scattered all about. That brings that part of the act to a close, often with much raucous laughter, as many people have already figured out that it is an act. Then I slink off and come out to the stage to ostensibly apologize, and I become the evening’s keynote speaker.

This time, when I did the last bit, blundering into the tray covers and falling on the floor,  one of the guests, one of the psychiatrists who had been watching me very carefully throughout the meal, leaped out of his seat, came over to where I was sprawled out on the ground and picked me up. He was a big man, so he actually just lifted me right off the ground. I'm not small. I'm almost 6 ft tall and 185 pounds. He lifted me up with a very tight grip on my arm. He swung me around and made very deliberate eye contact with me. And he said, “Are you OK?”

Now, at this point, all 400 people in the ballroom had gone completely silent and were watching us at the front of the room. You could have heard a pin drop. They're all watching us. And I didn't want to give away yet that I was the speaker. I didn't want that to be known. So very quietly under my breath, I said to him, “Yeah, I'm okay.” He said, “Are you sure? That was a pretty bad fall. Maybe you want to come over and sit down for a minute now.” He was clearly functioning in a professional capacity at this point.

I tried to counter this by looking at him with a very level expression, and I repeated, “Really, I'm OK.” He said, “Well, you may feel okay, but I think it might be a good idea if you and I went for a little walk.”

I could see where this was headed, and since I didn't particularly want to be placed in a headlock, I decided I needed to level with this guy. I had to tell him what was actually going on or he was going to drag me out of the room. So I dropped character completely. I told him who I was, very quietly. I looked him straight in the eyes with his much presence as I could, which came off with a kind of intensity, I'm sure, and I just said to him, in a whisper, “I'm a performer. I've been hired by your association management to do a comedy show. I'm about to go on stage and start a juggling routine.”

I was somehow under the impression that once I said that it was going to clear everything up, but that's not what happened. There was a long pause while I waited for him to release his grip, but instead he looked even more deeply into my eyes, tightened his hold on my arm and said, “I understand. Come with me.”

The director of the association, who hired me, was sitting in the audience. She had been keeping all this secret because my act is a surprise. She realized what was happening. She got out of her chair. She came over and she walked up to the guest, put a hand on his shoulder. She said, “Frank, excuse me. I hired this man. He's our speaker.”

That poor gentleman's hands, as he released his grip on my arm, his arms slowly dropped to his side, and he looked at me with this complete look of dismay. It was as though we had just told him that he was not the natural born son of his parents, and he was just learning this at age 60. That would have been the look appropriate to hearing that news. But what we had just told him, what finally registered for him is that I was not a person who needed an intervention. This is a very poignant story. It's even more poignant because he looked down at his shoes, he turned away, and he walked out of that ballroom and he did not come back for the rest of the event. He didn't even hear the keynote. He couldn't process what had just happened.

I offer this story because it's an example of the difference between a commitment as a defense and a commitment as context. If we adopt commitment as a defense against reality, against other people, against accepting that things change or that we have limits or that we're fallible and we don't always have perspective, or that we might not always be in control or be right, then it puts us in a position where it handcuffs us. That gentleman was ultimately well-meaning, probably really good at his job, and he wanted to jump in and help.

However, when we get new information, when new perceptions and new realizations and facts are presented to us, we have to be vulnerable enough to be able to shift.

Follow through at that point is to be in that conversation with reality, to listen, and get to where it is we were meant to go from the very beginning. We couldn't have gotten there without the commitment. The commitment is needed to get to that ultimate wonderful and magical place. But if it's a commitment of defense, then we're not going to make it. If it's no commitment at all, we're also not going to make it.

What's going to get us to that magical endpoint is a commitment context where we are willing to make a strong stand, a statement, a clear statement, we're willing to show up, and then we start dancing in partnership with what really is so.

And that, my friends, is the reason I'm doing this, because that feeling of being in that kind of relationship to life is the best thing in the world. To me, it's what being human is all about. In our new community, we're going to learn how to keep this dynamic alive, the commitment and context alive as we move through life so we can be active, dynamic, flexible, bright and responsive to what comes back to us.

The entry point to Life Leap is on the gamesforconfidence.com website, and it's intimately related to the Games for Confidence Project, which I've been doing for years. Go to gamesforconfidence.com and on the top menu, it'll say Life Leap and I put it all in caps so you can easily pick it out from the menu line there. I've got a ton of information on there now, all sorts of background information on the course itself, a bunch of questions and answers, the pricing.

If you've got questions, if you wat to ask me something about how the course works or whether it’s right for you, or you just want to talk about what your goal is, or you don’t even know what your goal is, but you know there’s something inside of you and you want help figuring out what that is, got to gamesforconfidence.com and message me from the contact page and we can arrange a time to talk, I would love to speak with you directly about what you have in mind.

Now, if you're listening to this podcast and it is past these dates of October 15th to 18th in the year 2020 then just refer to the landing page at gamesforconfience.com, there will be a new set of launch dates on the landing page and a new set of conversation dates that I'll have in my calendar because probably each time we launch, I will do this. I will post a new opportunity to have these conversations in my calendar on that page. And if you don't see the calendar there, it's because I had a conversation with reality and had to remove it. So that's the way it goes. That's the way the cookie crumbles. There you go, everybody. Thanks again for listening! If you're enjoying this, subscribe. Keep listening. Please leave a review. It's really helping me reach more people. I'm excited to see you all entering the course at this point. And on we go. I will be back tomorrow. That's my declared commitment. We'll see what happens. Game on!