15

DOUBLE-DOG DARE!

Whether we’ve decided exactly what our dream is or we continue to experiment with two or three possibilities, there are times when we need to simply “double-dog dare” to dream. Contemplating a dream is one thing, actually “doing” a dream is another, and the reality of pursuing a dream may require courage, boldness, and daring.

In the parenting book Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, Ellen Galinsky, a child education expert and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute, writes that one of the essential skills we need to teach our children is how to take on challenges. Galinsky explores this topic not by tackling perfectionism, but by examining how children learn to manage stress. Citing research done by Megan Gunnar, a professor at the University of Minnesota and an expert on stress and coping in children, Galinsky writes, “If you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they going to manage adult life—where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could manage?” She explains that one of the best ways for children to learn how to manage stress is by watching their parents model how they manage theirs.

By taking on our challenges, we teach our children to take on theirs, and give them the ability to dream. Further, it’s only when we move beyond what we know we can do and take a risk—or double-dog dare—that we can make our dreams happen. Consider how Avni Patel Thompson walked into the unknown as she launched her blog brandsundae.com.

Avni Patel Thompson: Point, Courage, Click

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I sat staring at the unassuming button on my laptop. Clicking on this one button would push my most cherished dream into reality. With courage I wasn’t feeling, I hit Publish.

We grow up thinking of dreams as bundles of hope and inspiration and possibility. But the oxymoronic reality of dreams is that they rely on a certain ambiguity and grandeur. Actually acting on them, then, has the natural implication of needing to deconstruct these graceful illusions into bite-sized, practical action steps.

Each of us has likely experienced this tension in our lives. For me, it was the right school, the right company, the perfect wedding. Some goals were more modest, like choosing my next role at Procter & Gamble. Others, like my lifelong dream to attend Harvard Business School (HBS) seemed nearly unattainable. But once I’d checked off my most immediate dreams—marriage, MBA, job—I no longer had a big, hairy audacious goal. I felt a bit lost.

So I started to examine that oldest, most precious dream again, spinning it around in my head, looking at it from all angles. At my husband’s coaxing, I took a creative writing class, trying to find the outlet for my thoughts. That didn’t feel quite right. I continued to be challenged by my consulting job, but I missed delving into the consumer psychology of behavior and bringing creative messages to life as I had done at P&G.

It wasn’t until one rainy night in April, when I rushed home from work to attend a women’s publishing panel at HBS, that I finally found my path. A group of wonderfully accomplished women in publishing showed me the way forward. Including, in particular, Whitney, whom I owe more than a fair share of thanks to getting this dream off the ground. The natural intersection of my interests in brand marketing and writing passions became clearer. The medium of a blog felt like a fit with my writing voice and time commitment as a part-time endeavor. I raced home, recounting every minute of the evening to my husband at an unintelligible pace. With structure as my best friend for execution, I got started right away, setting up my blog, and outlining a couple posts.

But, when I sat down on my birthday, doubts began trickling in through my shiny wall of aspirations. “What if no one reads my blog? What if others think it’s horrible and I’m a laughingstock?” This was one of my toughest moments of mental debate. I’ve had times when things haven’t gone my way. The disappointment felt overwhelming. But, what would happen if I failed at the one thing I’d always had as my ultimate dream? Would it not be better to continue living in the realm of possibility, where the anticipation and illusion of wild success still had a chance of existence, if only in my imagination? When I pushed publish, I would be putting a stake in the ground as a commitment to a different path in life, one that would lead me toward the vague unknown. Melodramatic? Perhaps. But that’s how it felt when I was thinking about putting myself out there.

It’s now been four months and I love it. Blogging provides me with the creative outlet I’ve always sought and I’m starting to get feedback from friends and strangers (!) that they enjoy reading my posts and find them insightful. Further, with this personal step as inspiration, I made the jump back into brand management. Two months ago I reentered the world of Brand Management on the Women's business at Reebok. It’s not perfect, but I feel a certain liberation and sureness of self that stems not from any external validation, but from a feeling of pride mixed with accomplishment.

Dreams are tricky things. They can make you soar and give you something to contemplate when daily life is too much. But having given them a chance to shift into reality, by finding the courage and giving it a shot, I’m finding they’re infinitely more powerful in practice than in theory.

As Avni deconstructed her graceful but vague ambition of writing into a plan she could execute, she also found her way back to brand management. These decisions likely contributed to her willingness to pick up and move to China with her husband in early 2011. The more we practice walking into the vague unknown, the more adept we become.

DARING TO BE A STAY-AT-HOME MOM

The tone of this book notwithstanding, one of the biggest dares a woman can take is to become a stay-at-home mom. It’s a dare that requires a thousand nos to naysayers in order to say yes to her dream. And I don’t mean the dream of bearing children, but of pouring energy into the rearing of children, opting out of the workforce to do so, and then claiming their power as mothers. Rachael Hutchins is a prime example of this kind of daring.

Rachael Hutchins: When I Grow Up

I had a tumultuous upbringing, and I remember thinking that when I grew up and had my own family, it wouldn’t be like that, that I would provide my children with stability. I felt compelled to correct the mistakes my parents had made by becoming the best mother I could possibly be. To do this, I felt I needed to be an at-home mother. Making this decision early in life was detrimental to my college studies because I really didn’t have any academic goals. All I wished and dreamed and hoped for was to become a mother. The pull of that dream was so strong I couldn’t envision any other options for my life.

During my first year of college, I met and became engaged to a great young man. Despite my parents’ concerns (and mine), even though I was only eighteen, I moved forward with confidence, given my conviction that marriage and motherhood were the right, in fact the only, paths for me. Nine months later, we joyfully welcomed our first child. I felt peace upon her arrival, that we had made the right decision in having children immediately, and that I was doing exactly what I wanted and needed to be doing. Mothering was a role I arrived at very naturally. It did not feel like a sacrifice.

After we welcomed two more perfect little girls to our family and dealt with my postpartum depression, we made the decision to stop having children. I was only twenty-five. I felt like a failure, as I had envisioned having a large family. For a while it felt as if my dream had died. But, just as having children was a right decision, stopping at three was also right.

Motherhood is a wonderful, exhausting, sometimes overwhelming, and often thankless job. I feel most discouraged when I believe I’ve failed my children by being short-tempered or emotionally distant, or when I see my negative behaviors in them. It’s discouraging when we can’t afford to provide them with more opportunities. I also feel down when I encounter mothers who seem to be doing their job—my job—so much better than I do. That’s really hard. And yet, as I’ve I known from the moment our first daughter arrived, I have given my children 100 percent, and I know I’m giving my children a better upbringing than the one I received. I take consolation in that.

My oldest daughter recently called home from school to say she had forgotten her gym shoes (not an infrequent occurrence) and she asked me to bring them in for her. I did, and later that day she said, “Mom, I’m so glad you’re home so you can bring me something if I forget it.” When one of the girls was sick and stayed home from school, she’d say, “Mom, I’m so glad you stay at home so you can take care of me when I’m sick. What would I do if you were at work?” It has meant a lot to me to be able to do these small things for my children because, in doing so, I see myself becoming the kind of mother I want to be.

My accomplishments may seem small to many, but to me they are huge. In devoting my life to my children, I have truly found myself. I have experienced exponential growth in my thirteen years of mothering and, thanks to the influence my children have had on me, have come so very far from the nineteen-year-old young woman I was when I gave birth to my first child. Now that my children are in school full-time, I am, at the age of thirty-two, excited about what else may lie ahead. But regardless of what I go on to achieve in my life, nothing will be as important to me, or as fulfilling, as being a mother.

After a childhood rife with instability, Rachael Hutchins has truly taken on mothering. She has made a conscious decision, declared her dream, and is daring to give her mind and heart to her mothering. It’s not always in the perfect way she had imagined, and there are likely moments of trepidation as she wonders if she can pull off what she hadn’t seen done, but she is doing it.

DREAMING AMIDST UNCERTAINTY

As we grow older, it may take a double-dog dare to continue pursuing our dreams in the face of circumstances we cannot control—like aging. That has been true for Lisa Poulson, a public relations executive who is single, just learning to knit, and lives in a lovely apartment with four walk-in closets in San Francisco.

Lisa Poulson: Dreaming 5.0

The great Roman philosopher Epictetus said, “Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, some things are not.”

Oh, how I wish I could attain this happiness and freedom. Instead, I rage and I pine.

Against the aging process.

To wit, my arms have become the consistency of melting ice cream, as if they were slipping from custard to liquid inside of a bag. When I bend over, my belly looks like lumpy pudding saturating a hammock.

My eyes are circled in lines. My knees shriek when I stand up after watching a movie—I limp down the stairs holding the rail, amazed and yet unsurprised at the betrayal.

Also, I can’t see. I can’t see who’s on the phone without my glasses. I can’t read the newspaper. I can’t read a prescription bottle.

And I am only forty-seven.

People tell me I look great for my age (whatever that means). I exercise (cardio and Pilates), try to eat the right foods, etc. I do try to control what’s happening to my body. But somewhere inside I know it is largely futile. I know I have turned the irrevocable corner from growth to decay, and I know that this is beyond my control.

Perhaps it is because I am female, and therefore trained to be deeply invested in my appearance, or perhaps it is because I am vain, and am therefore deeply invested in my appearance, but these changes pierce every part of me. Bette Davis was right—old age is no place for sissies.

It is not just my face and ligaments that are aging, but my soul, my mind, my perception of the future, my priorities, my regrets, my fears, my hopes. How does one navigate the path ahead after turning that irrevocable corner?

Epictetus also said, “Circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they do. People behave as they are. Embrace what you actually get.”

In the second half of life one needs new methods, new rules. One sets aside broad hopes and dreams for a glorious future full of adventures. One sets aside hopes for springy knees and smooth skin. One learns that the most graceful thing to do is to embrace what you actually get, what you actually have.

I’ll be fifty in three years. My plan is to work on embracing what I actually have, building depth about what I already know and who I already am and who I already love. This is my process for devising Life 5.0—my life at fifty—the new version of myself.

It’s a quieter way to dream, and a narrower way to dream, but nonetheless a deep way to live a life.

FACING OUR FEARS

Dreaming requires courage. Taking on our dreams is a bit like walking into a tunnel. As we contemplate the entrance to a dream, it may be unnerving, but while we are still surrounded by the known, there is a surge of armchair-dreaming adrenaline. Once inside the tunnel, we can be shrouded by second-guessing and self-doubt: “What was I thinking when I decided to do X, Y, or Z?” goes the refrain.

Then what? Some days we’ll consider retreat. Two years into my different dream, a headhunter called me about returning to sell-side research. I took more than twenty-four hours to say no, even though I knew I would say no, just because it felt good to be wanted. Other days we’ll advance, full of derring-do, willing to do whatever is required. (For example, to finance our dream, my husband and I decided to sell our home, which was a bold and somewhat scary decision at the time.) When any of us faces our fears and conquers the unknown, we trust that we’ll again move into the known, confident that it will be a better known because we’ll be more of who we are.

Tensie (pronounced TAWN-see) Whelan, president of the Rainforest Alliance (rainforest-alliance.org), didn’t walk. She ran through her fear, taking on the challenge of her husband’s sudden death while she was pregnant with their first child. She has translated her tragedy into daring to make her late husband’s dream come true.

Tensie Whelan: Seeing the Rainforest and the Trees

I am not so sure when the dream started. Perhaps it was as a young teenager on a canoe trip with my family in the Quebec wilderness listening to loons and wolves sing a duo across the lake. Or perhaps it started when I was a ten-year-old visiting my grandparents in Mexico and seeing poverty like I had never seen before. Or perhaps it was just being the bossy older sister who needed to find something meaningful to do after her younger siblings grew up.

But my dream has always been to make a difference—in a big way. In what way wasn’t clear at the beginning, but I knew I wanted to work in another country. I wanted to learn about other ways of doing things. Learn what mattered. Learn why people do what they do. Most of all, I wanted to learn what my place in it all would be.

I always cared about environmental issues. My first job after graduate school was working for World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., and then as an environmental journalist in Sweden and Central America. But it was not until my husband, Johan Ashuvud, an environmental economist, died in a car crash at age twenty-seven that I decided I was going to pursue efforts to make a difference for the planet in a big way. My husband could no longer pursue his dreams. I decided I would pursue our dreams for him.

Funny thing about surviving a tragedy like having your husband die after six months of marriage and being three months pregnant: you realize you can do anything. Really. Anything.

So I went after the dream. His dream. Our dream. My dream. I—we—wanted to radically transform how we all interact with the environment in order to create a better world for our children and their children, but also for all the beautiful plants and animals that share this amazing place with us.

Today, I’m the president of the Rainforest Alliance, an international organization that works in seventy countries to transform how we interact with nature and one other. (I’m also the mother of a lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter who looks a lot like her father.) We work with millions of small producers of crops, CEOs of big companies, and consumers to transform standard business practices. The candy manufacturer Mars is one example: in working with the farmers, foresters, and hotel managers to adapt their environmental, social, and economic practices to comply with our sustainable management standard, we help to ensure all their cocoa is sustainable. Chiquita has had all of its bananas certified by us. As a result, the farms these companies buy from have protected wildlife and their habitat, reforested native trees, reduced chemical use, improved worker housing and working conditions—and they’ve increased their yields in the process.

That’s the other part of the dream, to improve conditions for people as well as the planet; I’ve never believed you could separate the two. When I visit a Rainforest Alliance–certified operation, the people working there are incredibly proud of all they’ve accomplished. Their farms or forests or hotels look very different than the norm, and people around them begin to copy them. On one of my visits to Colombia a group of macho coffee farmers with machetes began to compete with each other over how many migratory bird species they had identified on their respective farms. Such a conversation would not have happened before the Rainforest Alliance came into their lives.

So the dream is one that many others are now dreaming with me. Together we are translating our dreams into reality. It’s exhausting. But it feels really, really good.

DARING TO DECIDE

Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin writes: “We hate to decide. We avoid deciding. We hide from it. . . . Once someone decides, they almost always succeed. . . .” Whatever our dream, it’s important to make a choice, to take things on, and then own what we choose. But that’s hard to do, which is why descending into the underworld was Psyche’s fourth task and not her first. Without the practice of establishing priorities, gathering needed resources, and learning to delegate and achieve goals, she would likely have failed at her fourth task, the critical undertaking of which was daring to say no to three people who would ask for her help in order to instead say yes to her beloved.

One of the ways we can decide to say yes to our beloved is to actually learn from one another how to dream. Heather Clayton Staker (see chapter 13), for example, a cofounder and former CFO of Karaiega LLC, now Yoostar Entertainment, and mother of four, has gained valuable momentum for her own dreams as she and her husband have worked in tandem to support and facilitate each other’s dreaming.

Heather Clayton Staker: Practical Tips When You Sleep with a Dreamer

Eight years ago I married a dreamer. Not just your average big idea guy: my man has developed three patents, launched two companies, written treatments for eight screenplays, and relied on spreadsheets to track his personal projects. His favorite date night is to recline on our carport high atop a Hawaiian mountainside and watch the trade winds push the clouds briskly across the starry canopy—while we brainstorm new products and business models.

On the bright side, my life with Allan Staker will never be boring. But living with an inventor has its complexities. So the second you find your significant other dabbling in the elusive, heed these tips, girlfriend:

Live free or die: Face it. Your family’s cash flow is not going to be the same as it would be if you had married a doctor. Expect to get payoffs in bright bursts, and then wait indefinitely for your next hit. Our best financial decision was to become apartment managers, which afforded us free rent during the riskiest part of our last venture. Go to your county’s tax assessor office and request a tax roll, which is a list of properties in your area, their owners, and addresses. We used this list to contact several apartment owners until we convinced one of them to hire us as his on-site managers.

Slash your costs: Next time Allan feels the urge to innovate, he will have to order the moving PODS (Portable On Demand Storage) first. Why? Because groceries in, say, Texas, are 46 percent cheaper on average than in Honolulu where we live, and housing is 62 percent cheaper. In Fred Brock’s Live Well on Less Than You Think, the author’s first rule is to flee from high cost-of-living areas. To see how far your savings will go in another city, check out a cost-of-living calculator. We will not attempt another start-up before moving to a lower-cost launching ground.

Stoke your sense of humor: During our last rollercoaster start-up, we had to fight to keep the tone of our marriage from mirroring the ride of the project. Humor was the key that saved our marriage from tanking when the business took a dive. Our favorite funny shows include Envy, in which Jack Black plays an inventor who strikes it ultra rich; Duplex, which is only funny if you’re apartment managers; and several Saturday Night Live shorts, like the classic Garth and Kat dress rehearsal version. And please, no talking about business or inventions after lights out.

Look to the rainbow: I imagine Allan will never have a traditional career path. Thus we have moved seven times and lived in three states during our eight years of marriage. Our current home in Honolulu is certainly lush and beautiful, but our kids often ask when we will move back to “America.” One night, when I was feeling homesick, Allan and I decided that, to buoy us up, we would to try to visit every waterfall we could find on the Hawaiian Islands. Recently, we flew our four small children on a twenty-four-hour trip to the Big Island to visit Umauma Falls. This new quest brought me tremendous joy.

Eliminate avoidable risk: Next time we undertake a new venture, Allan and I will be smarter about our business model and financing plan first. With our last venture, we could have eliminated some of the financial headaches and product viability risks if we had played the game differently. As Clark Gilbert and Matthew Eyring point out in the Harvard Business Review article “Beating the Odds When You Launch a New Venture,” entrepreneurs can prevent future pain by avoiding important uncertainties before going further with a project. This includes prototyping quickly and doing quick-hit market research to make sure that the fundamental idea is sound, before pouring in cash.

See afar off: In the book of Moses, God tells Enoch he is angry with his people, for “their hearts have waxed hard, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes cannot see afar off.” Perhaps the greatest pitfall to avoid as the lover of an inventor is myopia—the inability to see “afar off.” For all my stressing about my worn-out Isaac Mizrahi clothes from Target, I am married to a one-of-a-kind man with an unusual gift. When we were dating, Allan warned me that his theme song was Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Decades from now, I believe we will both look back on our start-up early marriage days as a time when he beckoned me, as that song states, to “take my hand and we’ll make it I swear,” and we did.

Heather is pursuing her dream of being a mother as well as partnering with her husband in the pursuit of his dreams. They are courageously pursuing a career path outside the norm, which takes daring and a commitment to support one another, through bad times and good. Their marriage is stronger because they dream big and dream together. As they dream together, Heather and Allan are teaching their children to dream.

Sometimes taking things on means that we just suit up and show up, and that we get into the game of our life with an attitude of “I will not be defeated.” Which is what Jenny Clawson did.

Jenny Clawson, is a five-time entrepreneur, whose launched company Mobonics (mobonics.com) won at TwilioCon2011, and received funding from TwilioFund and from VC investor Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. Jenny has experienced her own road of trials on her way to a dream, using pure determination to muscle through fear.

Jenny Clawson: Resistance

Resistance. We have all felt it at some point or another. We set a goal, have every intention of keeping that goal and realizing that dream, and then comes the morning. The morning where we wake up and think, what was I thinking? Did I really say I would do that? Yep, that’s resistance. And resistance is not a morning person.

Last year was my year of resistance. To everything, really. I graduated from B-school with the idea that I would take a break from achievement for a while. I wanted a break from the endless nights of Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. I felt I deserved it. Before going back to school I had launched a business, so I had spent the past four years working around the clock. And I was exhausted. I dreamed of landing some cushy job with a paycheck, so I could then work on more important things, like getting a tan and perfecting my golf swing.

You can imagine how well that turned out. The cushy job did not materialize, and I was stuck. Trapped, really. In the belly of the whale. But unlike Jonah, I wasn’t swallowed up for three days; it was for an entire year. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get “the job.” The more I interviewed, the more confused I became as to what I even wanted. What really started to worry me was not that I couldn’t get hired, but that I didn’t really want to get hired. After praying, pondering, exploring, I realized that I didn’t want a “job,” I was looking for a purpose. I wanted to know what God wanted me to do with my life. I begged, pleaded, bargained. And the answer came. It crept into my mind, whispering the one thing I didn’t want to hear. And then it became louder, nagging me incessantly, saying “it’s time to launch a business.”

So I did what any Jonah would do. I ran in the opposite direction. I watched a lot of Food Network channel. I went to the gym. I worked a little, and I cried a lot. I resisted and resisted until I went through all five phases of the grieving process: (1) Denial and Isolation, (2) Anger, (3) Bargaining, (4) Depression, and (5) Acceptance. It was at step four that I knew I was in trouble. Not achieving was not working for me, yet I just couldn’t do it. Every time I sat down to work on this new business, I became completely overwhelmed. The thought of it exhausted me in body, mind, and spirit. Hello, resistance.

Because I was incapable at the time of working toward my dream and had a lot of extra time on my hands, I channeled my energy into Tony Horton’s P90x exercise program. This program is known around the world for being an absolutely grueling, intense workout, geared to cause muscle confusion. So you are literally sore for thirteen weeks. And the workouts are long, an hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half each day, six days a week.

Nine weeks into the program, resistance reared its ugly head again. It was 10:30 P.M., and I still had the yoga workout to do. I despised that workout. It was ninety minutes long—which is an eternity in downward dog. I sat on the couch rationalizing to myself, “it’s O.K. to take a day off. You can just do two routines the next day. No one will know.” In the midst of this inner battle, I remembered something Horton said on his DVD (paraphrasing): Some days you will not be able to do as much as other days, but just keep putting the DVD in and pushing play.

So I said aloud, “Jenny, just get up and push play.”

And that’s when I faced resistance head on and beat it. That’s when I learned that it is in the I-don’t-feel-like-it-but-I-am-going-to-do-it-anyway times that we make the real progress.

To live our dreams, we don’t need grand visions. We just need to show up. Every day, even when we don’t feel like it, even when something “urgent” comes up. Even when we are scared out of our minds and completely overwhelmed. We show up.

So I have launched out—out of the whale’s belly and into the tumultuous sea. But I am out. And I am showing up.

Many of us arrive at a point of paralysis when it comes to diving into our dream. As Jenny learned, sometimes the only way through is to simply show up and do what needs to be done.

Whether our dream is to parent, paint, write a book, produce a film, or start a business, sometimes we’ll achieve what we set out to do, sometimes we won’t. Almost always what we do achieve will be different than what we originally envisioned. But, ultimately, it’s the aspiring, not the actual achieving, that most matters. In her book Simple Abundance, Sarah Ban Breathnach makes this distinction: “Expectations are the emotional investment that our ego makes in a particular outcome. When we use expectations to measure a dream’s success, we tie stones around our soul. Dreams [may] call for a leap of faith, a trusting that [Providence] will be our net, but they set our soul soaring.”

Though achieving our dreams is ultimately somewhat out of our control, who we become in the striving isn’t. Winston Churchill’s admonition, “Never, never, never, never give up” has always resonated with me. Thus our family’s derivative saying, “Johnsons never give up!” Even if you don’t know what your dream is exactly, never, never, never, never give up dreaming.

Making a dream happen involves risk: risk of failure, risk associated with change. Taking on that risk requires facing our fears and courageously moving ahead with determination. Part of saying yes to ourselves is learning to say no to detractors. Part of saying yes is simply saying yes, I will dare to dream.

DERRING-DO . . .

If you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they going to manage adult life—where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could manage?

—Ellen Galinsky, author and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute

Never, never, never, never give up.

—Winston Churchill, former British prime minister

Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

—Peter Drucker, writer and management consultant