Fear

When I was in high school, I was a socially awkward kid. I feared just being around other kids. I had a very difficult time making friends and connecting with people my age. There are many underlying factors that contributed to this, but that all began to change when I joined Junior Achievement.

Junior Achievement taught high school age kids about free enterprise by allowing them to start and operate their own businesses. Guided by volunteer adults from the business world, a group of 15 to 20 young people would capitalize by selling stock, manufacture a product, market and sell that product, and hopefully in the end, make a modest profit for its stockholders.

I was lucky enough to be assigned to a fantastic group of kids and adult advisors who helped me overcome my inherent shyness and fear of being around other people. Part of this process though came about not from their encouragement, but from my own stubbornness.

The first product our company sold was actually a service. In addition to selling stock, our company sold Halloween Insurance to raise additional capital. Basically, for $1, our group offered to come and clean up after any pranks on Halloween night. From toilet papering trees, egging houses, to smashed pumpkins, our group met to clean up for any of our clients that filed claims by noon the next day. We raised over $500 dollars to invest in raw materials for our real product and it only cost us a few hours of our time. The first year our group only had six or seven claims and it took us less than 4 hours to complete the cleanups.

Your parents typically are always your first sale and should be the easiest. Selling is not an easy task to learn, however, especially when you have a fear of interacting with people. When I first pitched my father, an insurance salesman, to sell him a policy, he laughed. He then proceeded to tell me no one would buy such a policy.

I grabbed my coat and at 8:00 at night, I went to the 10 closest neighbors and sold them each a policy. When I arrived home, I showed him the policies I had sold and stormed off to bed shaking with anger. The next few days I went out and sold as many policies as I could.

After the first week, when our company met again, I had sold twice as many policies as the next company member. One of my advisors, Mary Jo Erickson, offered to take a group of us out selling the following Saturday. I offered to go. In the end, I was the only one to show up on that Saturday morning and she encouraged me to apply for the Vice President of Marketing position in the company. I was appointed to that position the next week.

This was an inflection point in my life. From that point forward, whenever I was confronted by a task or life choice that caused me fear, I tried my best to lean in.

After graduating from college, a friend and I planned to tour Europe together before finding our first jobs. We planned to take a month to take the Grand Tour as they used to call it. Just a month before our departure, he backed out on me. I leaned in and went anyway.

When I returned from Europe, I wanted to find work in Washington DC to apply my business degree and political science major to a career in association management. I leaned into it and bought a one-way ticket to DC with no job, no place to live, and no place to stay the first night.

Over the years, confronting my fears has been easier with Amy by my side. She was fearless in social situations and I became comfortable just following in her wake. Without Amy, I feel small, surrounded by the enormity of the world around me. My feelings can be summed up by Piglet, a beloved character from A.A. Milne’s books and film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

“It is hard to be brave, when you’re only a very small animal.”

Fear has returned to my life like a giant tsunami. Not the stone-cold fear of horror films, but the more subtle fear that paralyzes you from being a productive person. It sneaks up on you at inconvenient moments.

I fear being alone each night. I fear traveling and taking on new adventures. I fear that I am a poor parent without her. I fear backpacking alone in the wilderness. I fear new social outings. The list goes on.

It seems it is time to dust off an old playbook and lean into my fears once again. I hope for courage. Forward.