When I was nineteen I took my youngest brother out rowing on a nearby boating lake. He was only six years old and as I paddled us both across the shallow water he became quite nervous.
I stopped and explained that because this was his first time in a boat, the rocking was completely unlike anything he’d experienced before. But actually there was no real danger: the boat wasn’t tipping over in the way he was afraid it might. And even if we did fall in, the water was so shallow that we could easily walk to the shore. Who knows, once he got used to it, paddling about in a boat might even be fun!!
These times of churning that we are living through are a bit like this: many of the situations we find ourselves in are unlike anything we have known before. And although the news will bring us scary stories each day, most of the time there is no immediate danger directly to us.
This means that if we find ourselves in a new and unexpected situation, our first task is simply to centre and ground ourselves — to stay calm despite the rocking of the boat.
Then, like Doctor Who, we can start to treat the challenges we face as opportunities for adventure. We can learn not simply to cope with what happens but actually to enjoy the experience, and use it to become clearer about what matters most to us and more able to achieve that. We can learn to become antifragile.
Have you ever worried about something that then didn’t happen or where the danger was low, even if it did? What would it have been like to have lived like Doctor Who and treated the situation as an opportunity for adventure?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)
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