Episode 13

Hey, everybody, It's Rick Lewis here with The Follow Through Formula podcast coming to you with Episode 13. I'm well past the halfway point of my commitment to record 21 podcasts in 21 days. And I did that for obvious reasons because I thought it would be a very interesting exercise in following through. And this whole podcast is about supporting you to keep your attention on what matters most and to put action to that each and every day if you can.

Obviously, this isn't the kind of thing you want to stress yourself out about or use to get yourself more rigid or more uptight. That would be counterproductive! But it's very useful and very valuable to start considering, “How can I take some kind of action on what matters most to me?” If we stop expecting ourselves to make big, huge leaps all at once, to get our whole goal met in a day or a week or a month, then we can relax a little and say, “All right. It's okay for me to take a small step at a time, just a little bit of attention on what matters most.”

Being relaxed is very important.

In addition, when we put our relaxed attention on what matters and take regular small action, it reconnects us to that purpose. Part of the thinking behind doing something daily is that it just helps you to keep your attention on what matters when things that matter require some real effort. It's so easy to back away from doing these small things because the overall picture seems so big. But when we balk or back away, our attention starts to waver, and we're not actively remembering what matters. Our intention is the beginning, but it is has to be put into action for it to have power.

Using small actions is a way to anchor your attention, kind of like a neuro chemistry hack.

Each small action requires and generates processes in the body, effecting our chemistry. When we take action towards something that matters to us, it empowers us to take more action. The whole journey we’re on becomes less overwhelming to us, and we start to engage more often and more easily instead of dreading what it is that we need to do to reach our goal. We start to derive pleasure from taking those small actions.

Right now, I am working on replacing my income that I’ve made as a corporate speaker, which I've been doing for about 15 years now. Suddenly this year, as of March, I'm completely out of work and looking to replace that income by shifting my focus toward working as a professional and personal development coach. I'm creating online courses, online training, and you can find that at gamesforconfidence.com. You can see what I'm up to there. And most recently, I am creating the Follow Through Formula Course, which you can also find on the Games For Confidence site under the Life Leap menu item. That is what I'm up to and what I'm shooting for. It's a big picture! There are many, many steps to creating an online business and to e-commerce and the learning curve is really big. So I'm working hard at that, and in the process of pursuing that, I've been having some thoughts this week about one unexpected obstacle to follow through.

It involves that degree of surprise we have when we suddenly realize that not everyone in the world cares about what we're doing or necessarily wants to cooperate with our plans.

I have all these ideas about what I want to do in my business, and at the same time I have my family to take care of. I'm a dad. I've got an 11 year-old son at home, and two grown kids who are on their own. Tangibly and most relevantly I have a child who still depends on my attention and presence and being able to help him with things. I notice that sometimes it's easy for me to get kind of locked down with blinders on about what I need to do at work and, especially since I'm working at home, I have this sense of being pulled out of my focus because things are needed at home.

Both my son and my wife are super supportive of what I'm doing, so I'm really, really lucky in that respect, but I still notice the difficulty I have with integrating these two things. One is that need to be relational with others and the other, at the same time, is to stay focused. We've touched on this topic a little bit before, when I spoke with John Souza back in the 6th episode called The Do What You Love Weight Loss Program. We talked a little bit about about how to stay connected withj others while we're trying to stay focused.

Follow through has got to take other human beings into account. And that’s not easy to do.

I want to tell you a funny story. It's actually another embarrassing story on me from my street performing career. I made my living that way for maybe about 10 years. I started by bringing a bunch of high level circus skills that I had to the street, and my idea was, I'm just going to show everybody what a great juggler I am and all the technical prowess I've got—how many balls I can juggle and how many tricks I can do and stand out there and people will put money in my hat. I quickly discovered that the high level of skill I had from practicing for years  learning all these circus stunts—juggling, unicycling, acrobatics, tightrope walking—all of this was mildly impressive to people, but I didn't make a lot of money.

When I first started regularly street performing at a place called Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver, British Columbia, I watched other street performers who weren't nearly as technically skilled as I was make a lot more money in their hat because they knew how to engage the audience. Their form of follow through in terms of making a living included people in a way that I didn't know how to do yet. So, I studied what other people were doing and tried to incorporate that into my own street show. Over time I developed more routines that engaged the audience and that started to get really fun. I started getting much more traction in my street shows and was making better money.

Even now I still struggle with being rigid and un-relational about how I want things to go in my own world. When people don't cooperate with exactly how I see it could go I get frustrated pretty easily. It has been a very big learning curve. It has taken many years for me to be able to hold my intentions and my big visions lightly enough that other people can actually interact with what it is I want to do, and that I can modify what I'm doing so that people want to come along and perhaps even be a part of co-creating what I'm doing. That has always been difficult for me. The degree of difficulty I had with this showed itself one day when I was doing my street show at Granville Island to a very large crowd.

I had this little interactive routine I did where I would juggle three balls, then I would get a volunteer out of the audience and hand that person a ball and we'd pass that one back and forth while I was juggling three. I was a silent performer, so all the comedy was physical and expressed through body language. Part of the bit was to locate a man in the audience with a really good physique as the volunteer, and I would bring him up on stage and then pretend that he looked too tense and I would be like, “Hey, like, relax, loosen up!” I'd shake my hands and shake my arms, indicating I wanted him to do the same thing and follow me. And as I got him to mimic me, the last thing I would do is raise my hands straight up in the air over my head, getting this other gentleman to mirror me exactly. As soon as his arms were straight up in the air over his head I’d reach down, grab the bottom hem of the gentleman's T-shirt and lift it all the way up and off in a tenth of a second.

I had seen another street performer do this at one time, and I thought it was really fun.

But you have to get the right person. It has to be someone who isn't going to mind showing off what they've got in terms of all the hours they clearly spend working out! In fact, they're going to be happy to have that on display. Granville Island is on the waterfront in Vancouver, BC , so it's a little bit of a scene where people walk around in shorts and T-shirts and flip flops. It wasn't inappropriate that suddenly someone is there without a shirt on, especially someone who wouldn't mind showing it off.

On this particular day I went into the audience and I found someone who fit the profile perfectly, exactly the kind of guy I needed on stage. I was so excited and I brought him up onto the stage and I went through this whole bit with him, knowing how perfectly he fit the bill. But he was reluctant. He was reluctant even to come on stage. I couldn’t understand it. I had to really work it to get him to agree to come on stage. In fact, I pushed it to the extent that I got the crowd whipped up into a chant, cheering for him to come up on stage and participate.  

He really didn't want to be up there, but I forced the issue because in my vision of this routine, he was the perfect guy. I wanted him on stage in my show! I got him up on stage, went through the whole routine, and whipped his shirt off. He was standing there. And he wasn't happy about the fact that I had just done that.

I realized in that moment I had pushed the limit on this.

I had pulled somebody up and forced him into place because I thought this was going to work for me and my show. But this guy wasn't happy. It was a moment of hard reflection for me. I really needed to pay attention to this. I saw my habit again of pushing, forcing the issue when I have an idea that requires other people's participation. It brought the mood of the whole show down at that point because everyone could feel it. Everyone could feel that he wasn't really into this. I finished the routine. I gave him his shirt back, he put it on, went back into the crowd, and I just continued on with my show. Because that's what you have to do.

You forgive yourself, you move forward, you learn from your mistakes and carry on.

The next thing that happens after this bit where I pass juggling balls with that volunteer is I get more juggling balls and I show people how many I can juggle. I got the additional juggling balls to do this next bit and went back to face the audience. I turned my back to my prop case, which was behind me, and tried to salvage the momentum that had been a little bit dampened by this interaction with this volunteer. I did the buildup, I was juggling five balls, and I could feel the energy to this show start to pick up again, people were bringing their attention back to the show.

What I didn't notice was where the fine gentleman I had embarrassed moments before had gone. I was facing the front side of the crowd. When you do a street show, you have people gathering on all sides. It's a 360-degree crowd, and there were sometimes 600 people doing that. This crowd was maybe eight or ten people deep, a big crowd. Rows of people kind of looking over each other and watching what I was doing, cameras up, recording, taking pictures. He had gone out the front of the crowd and circled all the way around to the back, but I hadn’t noticed that.

At the end of everything I do, I usually do some kind of flourish, taking a bow or going “Ta-da!” with my hands in the air. When I had finished juggling the five balls, I raised my hands in the air to take a bow, similar to the way I raised my hands in the air to get the other guy to follow me just before I took off his shirt. He had gone around the crowd and was standing right behind me, waiting for his moment. When I raised my hands to take a bow he grabbed the hem of my sport shorts and drop them to my ankles.

I found myself standing there suddenly living the real life nightmare of being naked in front of a crowd of people.

Have you ever had that one where you're naked in front of a whole bunch of people and you can't figure out how it happened? And then you wake up and you think, Oh, man, that was weird. This actually happened to me. They were sport shorts with a built-in liner, so I had no additional undergarment on. My shorts were around my ankles, and there was no part of me expecting this. My shorts go down and I'm standing there with my arms in the air fully exposed. And the guy who did it ran away.

The crowd instantly split into three different factions. One third of the crowd thought this was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen in their life, watching the guy who was obviously upset about what I did get his revenge and be vindicated by definitely one-upping me. Another third of the crowd was really uncomfortable, not sure how to process this, looking down at their shoes, not knowing what to do. And another third was upset by it. Some people just walked away because it was too much.

It was the most bizarre, awkward, embarrassing moment of my performing career. I felt so embarrassed I wanted to crawl through the floorboards and disappear. My face was bright red. I just wanted to go away, to become invisible immediately. Of course I thought about stopping the show. But I also knew that would make it worse for me and everybody else. The best thing I could do was, again, to carry on. I pulled up my shorts. I tightened the drawstring really tightly and made an excessively big knot in the drawstring which got a bit of a laugh, and I finished my show.

I think I probably stayed bright red for a week. I felt so, so embarrassed by that. I can still get embarrassed by it just thinking about it today. I share that story with you because when it comes to follow through it is vitally important to continue paying attention to the other people in your world who you ostensibly want to have be a part of what you're doing. Why else do we have goals? Goals do not exist in a void, apart from other people. And often our goals are for the purpose of helping other people or connecting better with people or being closer to our families or serving in some way.

The truth is that you cannot successfully follow through if you forget to pay attention to others.

That's always been a challenge for me, and it's a challenge right now. I always have to remember that my little vision about how I think things should go isn't the end all and be all. We need to be able to modify our plans as we go based on other human beings, and on what is needed in the moment.

I think that's it for today. Hope it's helpful. A point of reflection for you, whatever you're working on. That's Episode 13. I'll be back tomorrow with episode 14. Wow, I'm really making progress! I’m having fun doing this as well! I hope you're having fun, too, and I'll be back tomorrow. Take care.