BE YOUR OWN AWESOME™

I really appreciate Mary’s last post about Expecting Versus Believing, because it is in precisely the same spirit that I would like to say something equally provocative:  DON’T DO WHAT YOU LOVE.

Probably the first thing a life coach or motivational speaker will tell you to do is to “DO WHAT YOU LOVE” in order to achieve everything that you want in life.  Well, I am here to tell you that this often does not work.

Here’s the deal:  If I only did what I loved, I’d spend all my time eating salt-and-vinegar Pringles and watching reruns of Toddlers & Tiaras, but this would not lead to my success. In all seriousness though, I love to draw and make theater, but neither of these things has let me write my own ticket. So I propose an alternative: instead of trying to turn what you love into your sole vehicle for success, extract what you are good at (bad grammar notwithstanding) from what you love, and DO WHAT YOU ARE GOOD AT to facilitate your success.

At the core of everything you love is something that you are good at, so here is a practical application of this theory:

• I LOVE to draw and I am GOOD at visual design. As a result, I design logos and applications.
• I LOVE to perform but I am GOOD at telling stories. As a result, I create games and campaigns.
• I LOVE to throw parties so I am GOOD at connecting people. Therefore, I act as a hub to bring people together.
• I LOVE to create things so I am GOOD at coming up with ideas. As a result, I can think up things for other people.

The surest way to fall short, postpone or even fail all together is to believe in yourself.  A solid handful, maybe half, of you are not going to agree with me on this but that won’t be the group I am writing this for anyway.

Early in my career I experienced a ton of challenges and set lofty goals trying to keep up with the big boys and my strategy was very simple, don’t fuck up. When you are running around with adults 10 and 15 years your senior they only need ONE excuse to say you are too young to hang.

Without thinking I conditioned myself to only expect success from my endeavors in order to maintain my spot on the team. The result was just that, but it didn’t register that I was controlling the end from the beginning.

At the time I had a few ‘coaches’ I looked up to, one in particular that after a tremendous accomplishment I thanked him for always believing in me.

His response was the best advice I’d come to receive and it was on accident, disguised as a compliment.

“I don’t believe in you. I expect from you – believing in you leaves room for error and you are the most consistently perfect woman I know.”

At the time I was too young to appreciate the standard that statement set for me. Until recently I was unable to celebrate achievements because I took for granted the pure relentless hard work that goes into achieving your dreams based on the mindset that there wasn’t an alternative.

By setting forth the expectation to achieve X you’ve just told yourself when it is acceptable to quit, which is not until you freaking achieve that X.

I don’t want to make as bold a statement that ‘believing’ is for the mediocre but it does leave a lot of room for anything to happen before you reach the goal itself.

Just today I read in HBR about Rosabeth Moss Kanter teaching that everything can look like a failure in the middle and Gary Vaynerchuk ranted earlier this week on a plane back from the UK that the ‘fear of losing trumps the excitement of victory for so many people’.

I’ll acknowledge the [stupid] adage about expectations and disappointments going hand in hand. Personally, I probably receive several ‘you should really lower your expectations’ lectures a week.

Listen here, no one should expect another to lower their expectations. Let them own their own fears about falling short.

You will find that when I coach others and they do something tremendous I don’t look surprised. We absolutely celebrate their win but never do I tell them that I believed they could do it. I knew they could and I want so badly for them to KNOW that too.

Now looking back at my ‘compliment’ I understand that without effort it conditioned a skill that couldn’t be celebrated by belief alone.

Expect success, anything less is unbelievable.

We at BYOA believe that supporting other people’s awesome is a simple but extremely effective way of upping your own awesome. Offering support will foster new relationships and bolster old relationships, and frankly, making others look really good makes you look really good. So here are three ways to support other people’s awesome while at the same time upping your own: you can mentor, collaborate, and/or promote.

1) Mentor

As we discussed in the previous post, mentors are usually a few years ahead of the proteges they support (and are, conveniently, the opposite of haters).  So here’s the deal- you are a few years ahead of someone who would benefit from your mentorship (your expertise, your experience, your network, and your advice). This could be someone at work, someone at school, or just someone who looks up to you.  A potential protege may be fully awesome already, or maybe just showing signs of budding awesome; but when you decide to become a mentor you are investing in the awesome of someone else and that investment will pay out in the future.

2) Collaborate

You can’t do everything.  Really, no matter how awesome you are, you just can’t.  When you open yourself up to collaborations and partnerships, you are supporting other people’s awesome by giving them an opportunity to participate in whatever awesome thing you are already doing.  This not only benefits your collaborator, but it gives you more time and energy to focus on being your own awesome within the partnership.  With everyone focusing on the unique thing that makes them awesome, the overall project will be better, and the process will be far more rewarding for you and everyone involved.

3) Promote

You know people who are doing awesome things that might be entirely unrelated to what you do; for example, you might be an interior designer and you know someone who makes a really amazing soup. But if you share your friend’s soup recipe with your friends, you will be supporting their awesome and possibly creating new connections between the people you know.  Word-of-mouth is a powerful agent, so use yours to support people who are doing all kinds of awesome things.  Know someone who is crafty? Tell your friends about their crafts during holiday season! Have a friend who is a great photographer? Share their work!  Cousin is in a great band?  Put their music on your site. Sharing those awesome things will help someone expand their network, will be appreciated by your own friends, and will add value to your own social currency.

Mary’s previous post on loving your haters is a perfect point of departure for today’s post on the importance of finding your mentor, precisely because mentors are the opposite of haters! Mentors can come from any area of your life, and are usually at least a few years ahead of you professionally, artistically, or “educationally.” What is so great about mentors, however, is that instead of being afraid of your budding awesomeness and thwarting it, like haters do, they actively support you and your progress toward your own awesome.  People often ask me how to get a mentor and so the purpose of today’s post is to offer five ways to help you find an awesome mentor!

1) Surround Yourself With Your Passion

As you surround yourself with your passion, you will find lots of people who are also doing and succeeding at what you love- and these are the people you want to advise you.  They’ll be a few steps ahead of you and will likely know some of the pitfalls and caveats of that thing you both share.  But you won’t find those people who know how to do that thing you love well, unless you surround yourself with it.

2) Don’t Judge

Your future mentor might be doing that thing you love, however, they also might have tried it for a while and decided it wasn’t for them. So don’t dismiss the advice or expertise of someone who might not be doing exactly what it is you’re looking to do yourself.  Life paths can change quickly, so keep your net wide and your mind open, and you might just find someone who is versatile enough to advise even as your own path changes.

3) Accept Criticism

Part of the job of a mentor is to tell you when you are being an asshole, a slacker, or when you are trying to do things you just aren’t ready to do.  So if you aren’t open to criticism (though it might be a little smoother going down), no mentor is going to want to take you on.  Be open to hearing alternative ways to proceed with your goals in your life, and you might be lucky enough to hear some.

4) Ask

This doesn’t just mean asking someone to be your mentor; it means not being afraid to ask questions of your peers, of your peers’ mentors, and of yourself.  Find out all you can about what you are trying to do and the people who are involved in it. Asking lots of questions will give others the opportunity to help you.

5) Do the Work

This one is simple: if you aren’t putting your own energy into what you want, why would anybody else put any of their energy in to you ? If you are doing the work, you will attract people who want to help you do it.

So once you have a mentor, my last piece of advice is show your love!  Your mentors will help you with jobs, projects, networks, and all kinds of things you never imagined, so be sure to thank them every time they help you. If they give you a recommendation, or send a project your way, send them a “Thank you” note (yes, a hand-written one)!  If you want to talk in person, offer to buy lunch! And finally, once you get to the point of being your own awesome, pay your mentors back by continuing to work with them, reference them, and share with them opportunities that you can now offer them in return!

So we would LOVE to hear your stories of how you found your mentors and what they’ve done for you! Or, if you are a mentor, how did you come to work with your protege?  Share in the comments!

If you plan on being awesome, learn to love haters. In fact, buy yourself a shirt: http://www.zazzle.com/i+love+haters+tshirts

Ready or not, they will come. Personally this is a concept that I still struggle to fully understand. Considering that I have actually received some negative feedback about the idea of encouraging others to crush it at life, I thought it be a good time to address this in a post.

What is a hater? A hater is a person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. So rather than be happy for others they make a point of exposing those individuals’ flaws instead. [Source, Urban Dictionary this definition is not found in the Merriam-Webster version]

Last week I mentioned society possibly frowning on those that push envelopes towards achieving their passions. Heck, society sometimes even mocks other people for simply being happy.

In collaborating with many highly successful colleagues and friends who have chosen paths less traveled they all shared with me a common shocking surprise they encountered; not everyone wants to support their success and even some who they thought to be friends have gone out of their way to undermine them.

There is a saying that you’ll really find out who your friends are on moving day assuming they aren’t just helping for free pizza and brewskis. I say, pursue a passion and you’ll really separate out the haters from the advocates.

Some people are completely content with mediocrity and only like to talk about what they could do or plan to do or should do. [fair warning, if you get to know me, be careful what you tell me you want to do because I will remember it and wonder why you haven’t done it yet] When you decide to personally up your awesome [see rule # 7] you also put up a mirror in front of others around you and they may not like what they see; solace in mediocrity. Gross, I know, but what’s even more concerning is that mediocrity is a choice usually driven by a fear.

You see, not one person is perfect but everyone can be awesome. You’ve chosen to be awesome and that is so freaking amazing I literally fist pump the air while I type this! I don’t want any one person to be discouraged by what I like to call “the noise”.

The backwards silver lining is that having haters means you are doing something right, so high-freaking-five to that. However, you may be asking yourself, what should you do in return?

Very important: do NOT hate back. NEVER be a hater. Having haters can definitely be a buzz kill but being a hater is far worse simply because it means you are focusing too much on what someone else is doing and not focusing enough on upping your own awesome.

So, wish them well! Wish for them to re-shift their focus and join the best band wagon there could be, BYOA.

Hatin’ is bad, but it means you are doing something right. Let the haters hate, while you reap the rewards of harnessing your awesome and rise above “the noise”.

Speaking of ignoring the negative “noise”, I believe Lian is going to bestow upon us some wisdom about turning up the volume of motivational music through mentorship next.

Let’s boogie!

As Mary mentioned, Friday I gave a talk to a several hundred incoming freshmen at my alma mater, having been invited back as a “distinguished alumna.” The students were declared Humanities and Fine Arts students, and it was my job to inspire them and show them what all you could do with a humanities/fine arts degree.

It is interesting and challenging being held up as an example, because I know I am not a typical graduate from UMass. In fact, I’m not a typical graduate of any of the programs in which I participated. In most settings, I am a zebra amongst petting-zoo ponies, and offering me a microphone and uncensored influence over young minds can be a dangerous proposition. But with power comes responsibility, so I used my talk as an opportunity to inspire the young ponies and perhaps coax out some stripes.

After giving my “greatest hits” bio in an attempt to assure the students they should actually listen to me, I went on to give the young ones three pieces of advice about how to succeed over their next four years at college and beyond; so for your entertainment, I’ll share those with you as well.

First, I encouraged them to “nurture their networks.” I told them about how during my freshman orientation, I met a girl who I ended up working with for the first time 12 years later. I told them about how one phone call to a friend earned me four fellow alums (whom I had never met) to help me with a project in exchange for pizza and beer. I gave them heaps of examples of how the network pays off, even if it’s years and years from when you make first contact.

Second, I told them to take advantage of the general eduction requirements. Classes outside of the major garner the least enthusiasm, however I wanted them to look at these classes as opportunities to learn new metaphors and new languages to be able to communicate with people from all disciplines. Interested in social networks and crowd sourcing? Well, Insects and Human Society might be a good class to get that science requirement out of the way, and it might give you some interesting perspectives and metaphors about networks…

My final piece of advice was DO THE WORK. It seems obvious, yes, but having been an instructor for several years and full time professor for 3 years, I can say without question that at least half of my students never actually “did the work.” I entreated them to have fun, yes, but also take the time to experiment, collaborate, be disciplined, and find a mentor (I’m going to talk more about mentorship in a forthcoming post). Without question, doing the work is what would help them find and eventually be their own awesome.

All in all, it was quite fun sharing my crazy list of life experiences and tracing them back to the moments in college these incoming students would likely see very soon. It was quite an honor to be invited to speak and I am hopeful the class of 2015 (YIKES!) will find some zebras in its ranks.

In other news, I’m very much looking forward to Mary’s “who cares” post, because I completely agree with her “that society doesn’t exactly smile with open arms at people who go about doing what makes them happy.” Why is that, exactly? Fear? Jealousy? I don’t know. I’m hoping she will shed some light on this phenomenon in a future post of hers.

You are blessed because you woke up; you are blessed because you missed traffic; you are blessed because your friends are rad; you are blessed because you are truly doing what you love… wait, you are doing what you love, right?

No? Well, that’s not awesome. Why not?

Already, second paragraph in, some of you are rolling your eyes at me with doubt and mockery that not everyone can do what they love. Fair, but let me add to that so it is more valid. Not everyone can ‘choose’ to do what they love.

In passing, a former colleague said to me “the life we choose” and whether or not he meant for it to be something profound, it was, and it stuck. The tense was important also, present tense. So at any time I can choose, anything.

You are blessed with the ability to choose, and when you don’t make choices that make you happy, you may find yourself cursing your day, your relationship, your job, your awesome.

“…every blessing ignored becomes a curse.”

I can say from experience that society doesn’t exactly smile with open arms at people who go about doing what makes them happy, but that is a topic for a later post, focusing on “Who cares?”

So getting right back to this post, the essence of can you vs will you choose to?

If you have a passion for ‘your own awesome’ if you will, that you ignore, it will eat at you, and the universe will keep reminding you that you should be doing THAT instead.

We are all presented with a curse that can be made into a blessing, something great, and I expect that from you. I expect because a great mentor once told me to never believe in something great, expect from it.

Believing leaves room for error, and when it’s something you love, it’s the most consistently perfect thing you can experience. You just have to choose to do it.

Today on the east coast, Lian spoke to the freshman class at UMass about taking advantage of unlikely sites of inspiration, and how passion and discipline lead to success. Personally I can’t wait to read what she will post about this experience on our blog because she defines can and will.

I know YOU can, but WILL you?

I’m glad that Mary quoted the incomparable, irreverent, irreducible Oscar Wilde, as he was a man of the 19th century who was the definition of being his own awesome (even if such a word had yet to exist). Wilde was a controversial writer and playwright and I have spent considerable time studying him and his work; if you are ever interested in learning about a man who, in one lifetime, went from being one of the most highly respected men in the theater to being imprisoned for living a life of debauchery, look into his biography. However, the focus of my post is not on Wilde himself, but on the theater- and more specifically, the role of the Director.

As Mary pointed out, in any sport, the job of a coach is to find a player’s strength, train them, and prepare them so well for the game that they win- even if, as is the case with tennis, the coach can’t speak a single word to the player during the game. This is precisely the same responsibility of a director in the theater.

To be sure, there are all kinds of directors, and some might more accurately be called dictators (directators?). These directors are the ones who have a solitary vision of what they want and force their actors to mold to that vision, no matter their own strengths or weaknesses. In over ten years of working in the theater, I have never been that kind of director. Though I always began a project with a vision, I would chose actors with unique, untapped strengths I knew I could develop, distill and draw forth to make my vision that much more potent. I chose to work with only the best, but who may not have known it yet, and those who eventually, under my direction, would become their own awesome. After months of rigorous rehearsals, a kind of cross-training of the soul, each actor would become, in the words of writer/director Antonin Artaud “an athlete of emotions.”

As a director, my most sacred responsibility is to the work I do with my actor, because the moment the audience arrives, I must disappear, and my actor must rely on that work. No more notes, no more directions, no more restaging. In that moment, in front of the audience, I cannot change who they are or what decisions they make. I and they must trust the work we have done together.

It has been said that performing in front of a live audience is like being eaten alive in the mouth of the wolf. As a director, I stand my actor immediately before the wolf, armed only with two things: my training and as a result, their Awesome.

The wolf is always defeated.

As there is no cap on being awesome, there is no end to this list:

1. You don’t try to be Awesome. You just are.
2. Being yourself is what makes you Awesome.
3. Someone else’s Awesome does not make you Awesome.
4. Awesome begets Awesome.
5. Awesome recognizes Awesome.
6. Give props to others’ Awesome. Yes, other people are awesome too. See #5.
7. If you are not getting enough Awesome it is time to up your own Awesome.
8. There is no such thing as too much Awesome. Keep it up!
9. Handstands are Awesome.
10. Awesome knows not of humble because Awesome knows not of ego.
11. It is not your problem if others cannot handle your Awesome. Find Awesome people who can. See #4.
12. You deserve authentic Awesome. Not just some version of fauxsome.