New & Improved You!

My First Big Challenge

It thrilled me as hell. I was excited, yet fearful – excited at the prospect of gaining new heights, seeing the world differently, the world seeing me differently; yet fearful for failing, falling to nadir, hurting myself. I was about to attempt doing something that I had never done before in my entire life. While, there were others who had done this before, but this fact didn’t help me much. While they were around to boost my morale, I was practically solo in this. It was entirely upto me to gather enough strength & resolve to tide over the fear. And of course I was filled with thrill and curiosity to push me through the whole episode.

There was a stage, in the middle, when I had to leave my comfort zone and supports behind and push forward, without having things fully in control. This was my tryst first tryst with uncertainty. It was this moment that I was fearing all the while. I failed during this stage…not once, not twice, but multiple times. However, I gradually learnt – learnt how to fall with minimum hurt, and then eventually learnt how to succeed. The successes were initially small…just a couple of steps. However, the excitement and the sense of achievement I derived from these small successes soon propelled me to bigger successes. And soon, I was taking bigger, confident, multiple strides towards my destination. The old comfort was back. I could see the world with a new perspective and the world could see me with a new perspective. This success enabled me to reach out to things far & beyond my reach earlier.

I conquered my first big challenge. I was too young..just 12 months. I learnt how to stand up & walk without any support!

Yes, this was the description of the first big challenge I conquered. Please realise that I can copy paste the description for any challenge I have faced and conquered ever since! The template of the process of learning anything new or conquering any challenge remains the same.

The template is a three staged process.

Three Stage Process of Conquering Challenges

Stage 1 – Identification of a gap

You identify a gap in your current state and a desired state. The genesis of this gap can be a genuine need or a more subtle cause – curiosity. Curiosity is also a genuine need, but it is felt at a subconscious level, rather than at the conscious or rational level. You are comfortable at a base Stage 0. You feel a need to step up to the next level. But, as we learnt in Quantum Physics, it takes a quantum leap, which in turn takes some kind of threshold energy to break out. In the formative age (less than 5 years), this threshold energy is low, i.e. very little energy is required to push one into action. As one grows older, the curiosity factor weakens, and one starts deriving more and more comfort in the prevailing state of things. The emotion involved in the identification of the gap is no longer enough to do something about the gap.

Stage 2 – The Stage of Liminality

This is the stage of transition between your prevailing state and the desired state. In this stage you are betwixt & between – you are in a very uncomfortable, uncertain, frightening yet exciting, thrilling, lively situation. You are uncomfortable, uncertain and frightened because you are in the crossing over space between where you have left something behind, and yet you are not fully into the next thing. And yet, riding this uncertainty & novelty brings its own thrill & excitement, somewhat like what you feel in an Amusement Park ride. The anticipation of reaching the next stage also is a source of excitement.

• This is what happened to the 12 month old me when let go of the table I was holding onto and took baby steps (literally & figuratively, both) towards my mother.
• This is what happened to me when I was learning cycling or car driving
• This is what happened to me in my mid 30s, when I decided to learn swimming and used to often stand up abruptly in the middle of the pool when the breathing synchronisation went awry.
• This is what happened to the 40 year old me when I chose to quit the Corporate Slavery and took a 9 month Sabbatical

Crossing this stage successfully needs an approach which came to me naturally when I was 12 months old, but I forgot it as I grew up (I suspect you all went through a similar fate!). This approach is a feedback loop of:

• Trial & Error
• Course Correction

As compare to Stage 1, where you’re completely at home, you look very stupid in this stage. I fell in all directions, while trying to take baby steps. That was still fine, as I was cute and little. Imagine, on a sunday morning, someone in mid 30s springing up in the middle of the pool, gasping for breath making a loud as the air gushed in his lungs, as 5 others in the pool, 15 others in the Poolside Cafe, and 3 in the Jacuzzi tub, and a few caretakers watched with amazement! However, the embarrassment apart, the thrill that you experience in this stage is unparalleled. You should see the spark in my eyes when I took two baby steps, just before falling in trying to take the third step in a haste (Oh, of course, you would have seen it in your kid’s or nephew’s eyes).

So this mix of fear, embarrassment and thrill help you wade through this stage. The upgradation takes a while and a lot of effort & iterations to move from conscious to subconscious level. In two words….Embrace Luminality! Once you do that, you’ve arrived in…

Stage 3 – The New & Improved You!

This is an ultimate feeling. This is the feeling that a man gets, when after two years of pumping iron in the Gym, he gets a compliment from people about his fitness and physique. This is the feeling I got:

• When I successfully scrambled my way for the first time from the table to my mother
• When I rode my bicycle for the first time without supports
• When I swam full pelt, with style, grace and strength, to my non-swimmer friend’s envy
• When on the other side of my sabbatical (in fact, a couple of months earlier itself), I informed my office that I was not returning.

I gave the example of the 12 month old me trying to walk on my own because it is such a great visual explanation of the effect of conquering your fears. You reach a higher level. You become far more capable & confident. You can see and touch things that you could never earlier.  You become far more self reliant.

The whole process of conquering your fears and transmuting yourself into new & improved yourself is a great feat. It does wonders to your self image.

The Treadmill Adaptation

But again, after a while, you hit a plateau. In the corporate world, this is referred to as ‘The Peter Principle’ – people are promoted to their level of incompetence.

Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be.

– John Gardiner

This is a kind of a treadmill adaptation, where you feel a gap, work hard and fill the gap, but soon feel another void. You’re back to square one – Stage 0.  This brings you to the cusp of another cycle.

The finish line is just the beginning of a whole new race.

Susan Saint James

This, in my humble opinion, is what life is. It is a consistent effort in identifying your next challenge and crushing it. Those who don’t accept the challenges, stay in Stage 0. You may have crossed the stages several times, but the sense of past achievements is all gone. If you don’t keep moving forward, you find yourself in stage 0, irrespective of how many times you’ve crossed over. I was delighted with my ability to walk, but the delight stayed only for a few weeks at best. If I had stopped there and not tried to run or jump, I would have found myself in stage 0. Period.

Once we grow up, we resist accepting challenges because of the fear of being in the Liminal Space – being not able to hold onto something sollid. At best we identify the gap, but we never muster enough courage to do something about it. We accept our prevailing state and stay content with it.

“There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, “Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams”. Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it and yep, they’re still there.”

– Emma Bombeck

Once we get into the content mode, our life is devoid of any challenge, and without challenge it gets boring & listless. The body and mind degenerate into senescence, if not challenged enough. Stagnation, not only means you’re not growing as a person, it is actually regressive in many ways. Stagnation is ageing. It is death. It is zombification, to say the least.

“If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” – Dale Carnegie

Replace fear with wonder, it will transform your life. To live a life, you must embrace challenges; to embrace challenges, you must lose the fear & embarrassment of being wrong; to lose fear, take the smallest possible first baby step!