When I was nineteen years old I took my youngest brother rowing on a nearby boating lake. He was only six and as I rowed us both across the shallow water he became quite nervous.
I stopped and explained that because this was the first time he’d ever been 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 if it did tip over. 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 brings us scary stories each day, most of the time there is no immediate direct danger to us.
This means that when we find ourselves in a new and unexpected situation, when we find that what we thought was solid ground has actually become more liquid, then our first task is simply to centre and ground ourselves — to stay calm despite the rocking of the boat.
And 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, by using 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 The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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