The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 416 - FOYF

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hi, Jen.

Jen: If I look tan to you, it is because I have just returned from a vacation with my husband. We went to Croatia and Italy.

Pete: Oh, what?

Jen: It was amazing. But I had an experience while on vacation that I've found myself sharing with client after client, because there were some learnings when, Pete, I learned how to hydrofoil.

Pete: Oh my gosh, Jen Waldman on a foil.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: That is an exciting story that I want to hear more about. And I love that even on holiday, you're still out there looking for learnings that we can apply to life and work. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Hydrofoiling, oh my gosh.

Jen: Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was so fun.

Pete: Like, Laird Hamilton style.

Jen: Okay. So listeners, if you don't know what we're talking about, go ahead and Google Image that right now.

Pete: Google it, right now.

Jen: So let me tell you the story of how I learned this, first of all.

Pete: How you ended up on a foil would be a worthwhile story.

Jen: Yes. So, a very nice man named Angus taught me how to foil. I had never foiled before. I did not know anything about foiling. I did not know what kind of conditions were ideal. I did not know the technique.

Pete: Oh my god. Wow.

Jen: I put on a helmet. I put on a life vest. And he talked me through the steps. He told me that most people are not going to get it right away. It takes a really long time. Sometimes, people don't even stand up in their first week of learning how to foil. So, I try to get up. I fall on my face. I get back on the board. I try to get up. I fall on my ass.

Pete: Oh, that's a different part of the body though.

Jen: I get back on the board. I'm swallowing seawater by the gallon.

Pete: Oh, I can picture this so vividly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jen: I'm choking. I'm coughing. Like literally that night, Pete, when I put my head on the pillow, I heard the water sloshing inside my head.

Pete: Oh, I know that feeling. I know that feeling. That's great.

Jen: I just was eating it over and over and over again. Okay. So the next day, I'm like, "I'm going back out on the foil."

Pete: Yes.

Jen: I get on the foil. I stand up. I eat it a couple times. But then, I get up again. I ride for like ten minutes, feeling so proud of myself. I pat myself on the back. I'm like, "Yes, I'm crushing it."

Pete: "I'm a foiler."

Jen: Then, I go to turn in the foil and someone says to me, "That was so amazing. Next time, try to get out of the water." And I was like, "What?" I thought I was out of the water the whole time.

Pete: "Next time, try and get out of the water." Oh my god, that's such a head ruffle. Such a head ruffle.

Jen: Right? Because listeners, the foil is supposed to have you hovering. It's like a hoverboard for the water. So, the third day I go out. And I'm like, "I'm determined to get this foil out of the water." I do. I ride for like twenty minutes without falling, with the foil out of the water. So exciting. Then, the fourth day I decide I'm going to copy someone else who I see foiling. He's riding around with his hands behind his back. I'm like, "I'm just going to stand there with my hands behind my back." And I do. Anyway, it's around this time that someone tells me, "You know, the conditions the first day you were learning were like terrible conditions to be learning in." And I was like, "Wow, I'm glad nobody told me that." Anyway, so I know this was a long-winded explanation. But as I'm getting better at foiling, I was working with a bunch of clients. I know I was supposed to be on vacation, but I was still messaging, Zooming, all that. And I had one client in particular who was really feeling a lot of anxiety around an email she was planning to send, because she had never sent an email like this before. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to test out this foiling metaphor." I said, "You know what? If you aren't willing to fall on your face, you're never going to rise up." And I was telling her my foiling story, about how much seawater I had to ingest in order to learn how to ride. And the thing is, you'll never actually learn how to do anything unless you're willing to fall on your face. So, I've been thinking a lot about pulling apart all of the steps that it took to be able to actually get good enough to ride for thirty minutes at a time. And I think the key to it was willing to get bruised, willing to swallow seawater, willing to face plant. There was one time where my feet ended up over my head. I don't even know how my spine did that. But if I wasn't willing to do that, I would have never learned how to foil.

Pete: Yeah. So why did you not just go, "This is too hard. I can't be bothered." Something about the foil, the experience, the falling didn't seem to bother you as much as perhaps it might other people or in a different skill. Someone might be like...you could be forgiven for going, "Oh well, I tried. I can't be bothered. I give up." How come you didn't do that?

Jen: That's a good question. Well, Pete, this particular trip was different than one I had ever taken before, in that I didn't plan it. Someone else was in charge of the itinerary.

Pete: Oh god, that's the best kind of trip. You just show up and someone's organized everything. Those trips are a dream.

Jen: Okay, that's interesting that you say that. Because I was having a mild panic about it on my way there, where I was like, "I've never just done what someone else has planned for me. And I feel myself gripping about it and the not knowing." So, I made this deal with myself that I was just going to say yes to everything.

Pete: I love it.

Jen: Otherwise, I was going to be in a state of, I don't know, mental disarray the whole time. So, I made this commitment to myself. So when I saw the foils, I was like, "Well, say yes to everything. I'm getting on one of those."

Pete: "I'm getting on the foil." Oh, I love it so much. And yet, even save the first day, we fall on our ass. We fall on our head. We're bruised. We're battered. We go to bed. There's water sloshing around in our brain. And yet, you still wake up and go, "I'm going to give that another go."

Jen: Yes. Because, Pete, I felt that there would be a reward at the end of the work. Because when I watched other people doing it, it looked so fun. And everyone who is good at foiling started out bad at it.

Pete: My brother used to say to me, "In the beginning, we're all beginners."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: When did he say this to me? It might have been when I did my first triathlon. And he's done a bunch of Ironman and very intense triathlons and cycling events. And he's a very, very good endurance sport competitor, over the years. And I remember lamenting, well, it must have been one of my first times I had a crack on a road bike or something. And I was like, "Oh, I clipped into the pedals and I was at the traffic lights. And then, I fell over on my ass. I didn't have a click in time." And he was like, "Oh my god, a rite of passage. Everybody does that the first time they go for a road bike on clicking pedals. Because in the beginning, we're all beginners."

Jen: Right.

Pete: And I was like, "Oh, okay, I like that idea." I mean, it's true. Right? It's obvious. In the beginning, we're all beginners. And then, after you've fallen over the traffic lights a few times in your Lycra and made an absolute ass of yourself in front of a line full of cars, you go, "Cool, cool, cool. Next time, I'll unclip a little bit earlier and I'll avoid that mistake." And so, yeah, this idea that, of course, in order to get better at anything, in order to get good at anything, in order to learn anything, we have to accept, be comfortable with, make peace with, maybe even try to bring some joy in all of the failures, all of the missteps, all of the falls that come with that. I wrote...I don't know why. I wrote down FOYF, F-O-Y-F.

Jen: Wait, what?

Pete: FOYF.

Jen: Fall on your face?

Pete: You got comfortable with FOYF. Fall on your face. We've got to embrace a bit of FOYF. That's what I'm thinking. Is that the learning? Is that the name of this episode? FOYF.

Jen: Oh my gosh. That's hilarious.

Pete: How might we get comfortable with FOYF? That's the question in my mind. How do I get comfortable with FOYF, literally or metaphorically?

Jen: I love that so much. Well, you know what's funny, Pete? When I ate it a lot on that first day and I came back to return the foil, nobody said to me, "Who do you think you are, thinking you can foil?" And nobody was like, "That must have been embarrassing for you. Ouch." No. People were like, "That was amazing. That was so great. Like, good for you." They cheered me on. And I think the expectation sometimes when we're trying new things, well, it's that fear of people's opinions, FOPO. Is the antidote to FOPO, FOYF?

Pete: FOYF.

Jen: But it's that like, "Oh, what are people going to think?"

Pete: Ooh. What I hear in your story is people going, "That was awesome, Jen. You'll definitely get it tomorrow. The conditions were hard. Great job. I love how you fell on your face and your feet went over your head. That's so fun." You did this for me. And what they did for you is some version of the same thing, which is when someone makes something feel possible for you, it really changes, I think, how you navigate those stumbling blocks. You did this for me, actually, way back when we first met. And you asked me, after you were in the altMBA and I was your coach, you know, like, "Do you take on coaching clients? Will you stay in my life?" And part of what you did, in doing that, was make it feel possible that that's a thing I could do outside of the altMBA. I don't know, maybe there's some context where we can do it to ourselves or give it to ourselves. But sometimes, like if you were foiling on your own and there was no one around giving you any encouragement, I don't know if you would have got up the next day and done it. You would have been like, "Well, tried that. Okay."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: There's something in other people making things feel possible for you, when we're learning new skills, which is so fundamental or critical to enabling us to get up and do it again. Conversely, if someone had said to you, "Wow, Jen, you made a total arse yourself. I can't believe you did that," you probably wouldn't have done it the next day either.

Jen: Yeah. Well, that's a really good point. Because I wouldn't even have done it the first time unless someone was willing to teach me.

Pete: Right.

Jen: There's no world in which I would have grabbed the board and been like, "I can figure this out myself."

Pete: So, I think about...speaking of the altMBA, which is where we first met. I think about this experience I recall many, many, many, many times. Because this was a cohort-based program of people around the world, in groups of like you work in groups of four, and the cohort was a group of twenty, and there was a broader session of a hundred students or a hundred people, a hundred leaders. What often used to happen is people would share an idea, or a goal, or a project they're working on. And instead of being met with, "You couldn't possibly do that. That's a dumb idea," people would be like, "Awesome. What else could you do with that idea? Or how will you make that happen? Or what's your next step? Like, what do you need from me?" And we used to hear all the time that, "This feeling from people made my ideas or my goals feel possible. That was like one of the main benefits I got out of a program like that, this supportive network of people who instead of saying, 'You can't do that because,' go, 'Oh, you can do that if...'". And I feel like there's something in that.

Jen: Thank you for reminding me of that framework. The "can't, because" / "can, if". That is such a powerful mindset shift, and I hadn't thought about that in a long time. Thank you for that.

Pete: Yeah. For those that don't know, it comes from the book A Beautiful Constraint, which is such a good book. And yeah, it puts forward this hypothesis that often we respond to things with, "Oh. We can't do that, because...". And it actually changes the way we approach it if we switch that to, "We can do this, if...". So, the "can, if" instead of "can't, because".

Jen: Yeah. So I want to encourage myself, I want to encourage you, and I want to encourage all of our listeners to fall on our faces more, to heighten our FOYF threshold, as it were.

Pete: Also, I'm absolutely not saying this to knock the person that was afraid of the email. Because I relate to that so much, in my bones.

Jen: Oh my gosh. So hard, yeah.

Pete: And I feel like so many people do. But it's so funny that we build up things like, "I'm scared of sending this email," or, "I'm scared of shipping this proposal." In my context, this happens a lot. "I'm scared of asking this question." The consequences of doing that are so low. Like sending an email, you're not going to FOYF. You know? You're not going to hurt your face, unless you trip and knock it on your keyboard or something. Like the consequences, I think, we can overstate and overwrite in our head, to the point where we build up this like fear, versus the almost jovial way you've approached, "Oh, I fell on my ass. Oh, I fell on my face." Like how can we approach, you know, a low stakes email? Or maybe it is a higher stakes email, I guess, that's going to a very senior person or a big ask. But how can we approach the consequences of that with as much triviality as you're approaching the foiling falling on your ass?

Jen: To add to that, also knowing that if you do FOYF along the way, that you're actually one step closer to the thing you're trying to do.

Pete: Right.

Jen: There really is no world in which you can do something new without making some sort of mistakes along the way. So if you're not willing to fall on your face, if you are anti-FOYFing, you're going to stay exactly as you are right now.

Pete: Right. So, we need to celebrate the FOYF. We need to look for the FOYF. We need to remind ourself that the FOYF is the point, for us to get where we want to go. Now, I just finished an incredible book by Ant Williams, who is this New Zealand free diver and high-performance mindset psychologist. And he does so many incredible things in this book. He talks about a lot of his world records, of like holding his breath for like six minutes, swimming two hundred and something meters on a single breath. He went and did this challenge in the Arctic where he went under the ice for, I don't know, it was one hundred and eighty something meters from like one little sinkhole to another sinkhole. He's nuts. Absolutely wild. But what he talks about is he breaks down the swims in such a visceral way, where you feel like you're there with him. And so, he's like, "I'm at twenty-three meters now. I can feel the pressure in my lungs starting to build. And I remind myself, that's what happens at the twenty-three meter mark. My lungs start. So it's like, that's the thing that obviously is going to happen. This discomfort that I experience at each little checkpoint along the way is unavoidable. I just have to change my relationship with it. I have to expect it. I have to kind of look for it and go, alright, great. Now, I know exactly how much air is left in my lungs." He can literally tell how much air is left in his lungs, based on the way it's convulsing at the certain depth. It's like, holy crap, that is wild. So, he's doing his little version of checking in on the FOYFs along the way.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: So all this to say, how do we recognize that in order to get where we want to go, in order to learn new skills, achieve new things, build new careers, we have to anticipate, look for, welcome the FOYFs.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.