Episode 5

Hi. My name is Rick Lewis. You have tuned in to the Follow Through Formula Podcast. This podcast is all about what it takes for us to follow through on what's most important to us, even when it scares us. I'm passionate about this conversation, and my intention is to create a place where you can come and get food for thought that is going to push you into action and give you motivation and the insight and inspiration you need to actually take action on what matters most.

I want to tell you another story today. Many of you will remember the business collapse of 2008/9 the year the bottom fell out of the stock market. Bankruptcies soared by around 30% and everything involving business seemed to come to a screeching halt. I had been working for many years as a corporate entertainer and comedian. Now, while the entire economy was dealt a big blow, the meeting industry was hit even harder after a few high-profile corporations were publicly criticized for spending shareholder money on “unnecessary special events” at that time.

So understandably, the result was the mass cancelation of planned business gatherings and conferences. Even that has been dwarfed by what's happening today. But this was a very similar circumstance where the event and meeting industry pretty much completely folded. So the experience for me and many of my industry peers and colleagues at that time, event planners, speaker bureaus, entertainment agencies, hotels, all form of meeting suppliers, was unprecedented.

Those of us who had been in the industry for decades had never seen anything like this. My business phone wouldn't ring for the next six months. All I knew was that our bank account was shrinking month by month, a one-way outflow of expenses with no replenishment. We had two kids from a previous marriage, and my wife was in her first trimester of pregnancy with our third child. I was watching her belly grow, my family of four about to become my family of five, and not a stitch of work was in sight, like millions of others at that time.

I was worried and losing confidence in myself and in this situation day by day. As a self-employed entertainer, I had learned the basics of web design so I could market my services online. I lived in a small town and I started pounding the local pavement, walking into shops and stores to see if I might convince a few small business owners to invest in an online presence by hiring me to create a website for their company. I was successful enough at doing that and getting these small jobs to keep us afloat, and I started getting better at web design. I really actually enjoyed helping business owners tell their story by defining the essence of their unique value and services and communicating that offering in words and pictures. As many other people had done at this time, I was taking a large pay cut to find work, but I was relieved to be slowing down the draining of our resources even a little bit, and I started to think about what it would take for me to actually make a decent profit by dedicating myself to this new profession of designing websites for people.

I went to share these thoughts with my wife. I told her about the success I was having and some of the ways I imagined this new design business could grow. I shared my fears regarding our finances and the relief I was feeling in discovering that I had an avenue that I could take to bring us some income. As I spoke I imagined that she was sharing my feeling of relief. But after I was done with this explanation of how maybe I should pivot here, what she said completely surprised me. It wasn’t just her words, but the force behind them—a force that would change my work and the course of our lives together in a very dramatic way.

She began by saying that she understood my thinking and that it made sense logically in the face of our circumstances. Then she looked at me with this commanding expression on her face and she said, “I forbid you to become a web designer.” Then she stopped and she waited for my brain to catch up. This is not what I expected from the mouth of a pregnant woman.

“That's not what you're here for,” is what she said next. “You were born to be in front of audiences, to make them laugh, to entertain them, to lift people up and to inspire and communicate about human potential to people. That's what you're here to do. All you need to do is commit to that. That's our future.”

I still tear up when I tell this story because of the way she was willing, in the face of what we were facing, to stand for what she really knew about me. But at the time, her response really blindsided me. I'd been called out. She was really confronting me for playing small, and at the same time she was giving a huge vote of confidence to me and for who I really am. She looked straight past all these good reasons I had for switching professions, past the sales person in me who was dangling the promise of some kind of security in the future, and held who I really am and who I am not at the same time in a fierce and loving demand.

“You are not a web designer,” she concluded. In that moment I was both exhilarated and scared by what she was standing for.  That is how it is if we're willing to put ourselves in front of people who believe in us. People who believe in you are dangerous in this way, because they're going to hold your feet to the fire and demand that you stretch and get out of your comfort zone to be who you really are, to let who you really are lead the way. Then have to play catch up through the actions that you're going to need to take to live congruently with that truth about who you really are.

My fear, on the surface, was concerned for our survival. I could have justifiably defended that even in the moment. But underneath that was an unconscious reaction that was going on to me. The truth was that I was afraid of something that I had been ignoring in myself. A bigger calling, a sensed potential that I could offer something more to my audiences. And that something more was entering the role of a professional speaker.

Now, as I mentioned, I had been just a comedian up to that point. Not only was I just a comedian, I was a silent comedian because my mode of entertaining was developed as a street performer, and I was a silent physical comedian on the street. That's how I made my living for many years. From there I got discovered by an executive from GE Plastics. He introduced me to corporate events. Over the years doing corporate events, I watched lots of speakers coming in either before or after me doing my comedy show, and I would watch what they were doing and part of me thought I could do something like that. I could speak to all the things I've seen and learned about human beings in my time as an interactive performer. And yet I didn't. I never made the leap because I was kind of safe and secure in my little comedian role, making pretty good money.

But underneath, I had this impetus for years to move in that direction. And this what my wife was saying to me, was really calling forth in me. This moment represented what would be a turning point out of this safety zone, and I had to decide if I was going to take up this challenge. Am I going to move toward this possibility or am I going to play it safe and stick to this web design thing? But I was scared and unsure I'd be able to pull it off, and I wanted to be done with being scared and unsure. Having to produce a new income source was scary enough. But now she was saying, you know, we gotta keep going down this path and you've got to go for this thing.

There I was facing this fear. It was really a crazy commitment to make in light of our circumstances and the state of the event industry. There were no guarantees in my taking that approach trying to become a speaker. I would need to reinvent myself as a presenter of ideas and content relevant to businesses and corporations that were currently at zero spend for those services. I'd be competing with hordes of other speaking candidates looking for work. So needless to say, this was a huge challenge. 

But it was also undeniably the right path to commit to. As the weeks rolled on, my wife encouraged me to take advantage of the downtime I had because I wasn't going anywhere. She encouraged me to fully commit to developing the new material that could take my presenting career to an entirely new level. With the benefit of her support and with nothing but time on my hands, I took the opportunity to engage in an intense period of writing and reflection to find the language that would convey what I believed in. I was writing something that I hoped would resonate with other people. But I had to inspire myself more than anyone to rise to this new role. I was kind of birthing myself into uncharted territory.

Day after day I'd go and sit at my desk with this commitment to write, and for months on end I would have to force myself to stay in that chair. I'd want to go get snacks or go for a walk or go take a nap. But I forced myself to sit in this chair at my desk, and I wrote for 8, 10 12 hours a day. I wrote about all the amazing stories and incidents of my performing life, all the notable things that happened between me and other human beings, and about what I had seen about being human, both moments of real inspiration and moments that were very sobering, that illustrated how human beings work.

As I was writing down the stories, I was searching for a theme to it all, a place to come from that I could authentically stand in. What did I really have to say? What did I know about? What did I have the courage to demonstrate? After months of generating, I had a list of over 300 potential titles for this collection of stories. One day I was playing with words and turning them over and around and using different phrases, and I stumbled upon the precise language I needed to communicate my new profession. I thought to myself, “I'm just breaking rules all the time. I just like breaking rules.” And that's when the light went off and I realized that I was a professional misbehaver, and the title for my book came right out of that. The book is called Seven Rules You Were Born to Break, and that's the moment it came into existence.

First of all, these were seven rules that I personally needed to break if I was going to make it through this tunnel that we were in. I followed my own advice while I kept recording these stories and then putting them into the framework of the seven unconscious ways of thinking and behaving that keep us limited, which I see operative in our culture. So with no guarantees that this new approach would be accepted or marketable to the meeting industry, I just kept writing down my thoughts and my stories, and the book slowly took shape. I stuck with it, eventually finished, and began to communicate this new offering as a speaker.

This was in the Fall of 2009. I was nervous and I still felt unqualified because this was a whole new domain for me. I was still offering entertainment, but I started to offer this other piece in addition, speaking on this topic that I had created. Slowly work started to materialize. People began to be interested in this messaging I had come up with, and work picked up even more in the following year. In a still sluggish economy, I made double the income I had ever earned in a single year as just a comedian. My business grew exponentially and has continued to grow up until March of this year as a result of my wife holding my feet to the fire, encouraging me to walk my talk, and sticking with it over time, actually doing the work.

The point is, fear and doubt had almost convinced me to walk away from one of the most important opportunities of my life. My wife and I have always held each other accountable for not caving in to our self-doubts and fears. I've held her up and she's held me up. We live in an atmosphere where we challenge each other to keep our head above reactive patterns. Because of the work we do together and her support in this instance, I was able to act from a position where I was being responsive, rather than reactive, to what was possible.

So my advice to you is to put yourself in front of a person who really sees you, who really knows you, who really believes in you. If there's something you need to follow through on—maybe you don't even know what it is you have to follow through on, you just know that some kind of movement or shift or change is possible—put yourself in front of a person who really sees you, who really knows you, who really believes in you.

That's not an easy thing to do, to spend time around people like that, when you're scared. It’s important that you are willing to take some action based on who they see you to be. Because once you get in motion and you start trying things, that's when the clarity comes. That's when you can start fine tuning and you realize, Oh, this is a right direction. Even though it might be scaring you, you'll be able to feel in your body that it is the right way to move. Or you might discover that going in that direction isn't working, that it doesn't feel right, and that gives you important information, too.

Be willing to put yourself around people who believe in you, even though they're dangerous. Ask for their input. Who do you see me as? What are my skills? What are my talents? What should I be up to? What do you see lights me up when I do it and brings energy to me and makes you happy to see me in that state? Consider going to those people and opening yourself to their support and their guidance and their suggestions for you.

That's my story for today and my nugget of wisdom about follow through and one way that you could get some leverage for yourself to follow through in the things that scare you and do what's most important. My name is Rick Lewis. This is the follow through formula podcast, and this has been day five of my commitment to 21 days of podcasting. I'll be back tomorrow on day six. Thank you so much for listening.

And if you want to have a find a place where you can get help taking these actions that move you a little bit outside of your comfort zone, you can also go to my website, gamesforconfidence.com. Go to the Get the Games page and there's a trial game set on there. I've got three trial games of little growth exercises there. I actually have hundreds of these games, but I've got a few of them up there for free. They give you a way to get in motion and push yourself a little bit in a fun way.

Also, make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss the ones that are coming. And also please leave a review if you're enjoying what you're hearing, reviews are most helpful to get the podcast more visible in the iTunes search engine. Leave a review and let people know how you're finding it so far, and that will help me to reach more ears with this conversation. Take care for today, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Game On!