Risk your pride
Dear Team Joy,
This week we're going back in time:
It’s the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I am 14.
I’m sitting with my mom curled up in the front-seat of her silver minivan.
From our spot in the parking lot, we can see the other girls gathering leisurely for the start of soccer practice: putting on shin-guards, ripping off pre-wrap to keep their hairline in place, and chatting easily amongst each other.
I stare out of the window with a mix of longing and terror.
I promptly announce to my mom, “I cannot get out of the car.”
She laughs. “Isabel, it’s going to be fine. You love soccer, and they will love you. You can do this.”
But I am frozen.
Maybe I don’t really want to play soccer (the sport I have played since I was 5) in high school after all?
This is a new school, and since soccer starts a few weeks before the school year, this will be my first introduction to this school, and this group of girls.
I am intimidated. I want this moment, yet somehow it feels too momentous now that I’m here.
The start of high school!
I’m not ready. It feels like I need to go home (become a new person) and come back with more armor and confidence.
Will I have friends?
Will I make the team?
Will I belong?
I want a new group of friends. I want to belong. I want to be a soccer star at this school.
Deep down, I want everything that comes with getting out of the car.
But the vulnerability feels too intense.
Can I just skip to the part where I already have friends? When I have already proved myself as a player? Maybe it would be easier if I just went home?
I stare out again. My mom is pointing out that they are going to get started soon.
I sigh.
I muster my courage, and finally, (with a lot more drama than I am recounting here), grab my bag and leave the safety of the minivan.
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I think about that seemingly simple decision to get out of the car often.
That parking lot is one of my first conscious memories of embodying the uncomfortable tension of dread and longing.
With that decision at 14, I affirmed to myself that I am courageous enough to risk rejection, in the hopes of becoming the person I sense I am supposed to be.
To this day, when I feel that familiar mix of longing and dread I remind myself to breathe, and have the courage to leave the car…
When I am getting ready for a first date and think, “It would just be easier to not go, imagine what else I could do with that time…”
When I am doing the prep work to facilitate a training I haven’t led before and think, “It would just be easier to tell the planners I don’t have this skillset.”
When I am speaking with a new potential client and think, "It would just be easier if I don't make a direct ask for their business and instead wait to to see if they inquire about it..."
Those brief moments before you’re seen, before you take the risk. When you're secretly hoping that the thing you desire will fall into your lap instead of having to risk rejection.
You're scared that you will be seen, and also terrified that you won’t be.
Here's the truth as I have come to see it:
Almost everything we really want in life requires us to endure our own vulnerability. 🤯
Vulnerability is required.
It can be so uncomfortable, we will do a lot of things (like abandon our own dreams) to squirm our way out of it.
But when we don’t, when we decide that we’re willing to attend to our own discomfort, we expand what we’re capable of handling.
We build the confidence to risk our own vulnerability.
This work of intentional vulnerability, also known as healthy risk-taking to go after what’s most important to us, is the work we are doing in Activate.
Activate is a wild, joyful bootcamp for identifying, owning, and achieving your dreams.
A client described the work like this:
I want to lean courageously into the life I want for myself. I don’t want the safe path. This program has helped me experience the expansion that comes from healthy, courageous risk. This growth is so meaningful and empowering to me.
What’s the “risk” you find yourself longing to take?
Where do you find yourself refusing to get out of the car because of fear of rejection?
If you want to talk through it, book time with me here:
Much love,
Isabel