10
When You Have to Be a Superhero
There are times when you look back and think, “I have no clue how I did that. That was [amazing, the greatest thing ever, a miracle]!” You thought it couldn’t happen. But when something stirred inside, you knew you were going to do this. It was a ridiculously impossible assignment. You stood up to the organization and changed its course in some way. How it happened is a mystery, but you were unbelievably courageous—a fool, more likely a hero.
Take Shannon’s case. She’s been looking after herself since she was 17 years old. That’s when Shannon left home in the middle of the night, after another violent fight with her father. Taking along her mother and twin sister, Shannon stayed with friends. She then found a job to support them.
So Shannon is one to take on tough challenges without regret, as she did a year into her recent job in digital marketing at a leading pharmaceutical company:
I took this project by the horns! The program had been run by 10 people. People had been fired or promoted as a result of working on it. The team had been dismantled. Now they were trying to hire new team members. I was pretty much on it by myself with some external support.
We had to be more creative—not just repeat the old way of doing things. I told them we had to go big or go home. That made some people uncomfortable. I prefer not to just phone it in but rather, take a big risk. Either it’s phenomenally successful, or it’s not. Strategically, I felt we would have mediocrity if we just fiddled along. We had to catch up. So I pushed the envelope.
With the strength of 10, Shannon finished what others couldn’t—turning the digital marketing program into a great success:
It was pure, unadulterated hell. I just didn’t let go. Even when it felt like things were not going to get done, I worked through the night and didn’t let anything drop. You want to bring everyone with you, but you have to get work done. I had to manage expectations and politics. It was a high-stress environment. I slowly started winning them over with smaller risks. For example, I hired a creative agency completely the opposite of what they were used to.
I’ve always been very scrappy. As soon as there is an opportunity to achieve things, I want to get 100 percent. It proved to senior leadership that I could do a good job and could be trusted to run this all by myself.
Shannon presented the project to the CEO. The New York Times wrote a story on it. And she was promoted two months later.
The heroes in the five stories that follow, like Shannon, displayed fortitude, courage, and belief in a mission much bigger than themselves. Hopefully, they will persuade you that taking on superhero challenges is worthwhile:
• How do you become a superhero? Born on a tiny island far away, David’s journey eventually took him to New York and a profession he had only dreamed of.
• What happens when you stand up to leadership? Alessandra found skeletons in the closet, but only she was brave enough to do something about it.
• What do you do when both work and life threaten you? Two demons plagued Elizabeth: a mysterious kidney disease and a boss she called “the Devil Incarnate.”
• How do you take the ultimate stand? With a radical market strategy in hand, Sam overcame resistance from the entire organization.
• What happens when you battle the supervillains within? As James experienced extraordinary success, fear threatened to destroy it all.
Superheroes fully embrace risk taking. Most show early interest in adventure and newness. They thrive in crisis. Because they’re purpose driven, superheroes make huge personal sacrifices without much reflection. Their reward is the highest high you can get at work.
They’re like the rest of us in some respects. Do you want work without risk or challenge? (Hint: That gets old pretty quick.) Do you want stability over everything else? (Hint: Those days are gone.) Even if you prefer to hang out in the comfort zone, someday you may need to be a superhero.
When that time comes, you’ll be ready.
THE QUIET HERO
The superhero’s journey is less about what you accomplish, though the trials are impossible by definition, than how you face the obstacles in your way.
Life started for David in Jeju, a tiny island in South Korea. When he was five, a Mormon family from Iowa City met him and provided a new start. But everything seemed to be a struggle:
My adoptive parents told me I was gifted and had abilities, but I didn’t do well. I was always middle of the pack. The most frustrating part of life was the conflict between my potential and what I could do to perform.
Being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) gave a name to my frustration and how I could cope. I began to take medicine. It’s a gift and a curse! It gives me the ability to hyperfocus on what I’m passionate about.
Even then David faced a mountain of obstacles: finishing college after dropping out, finding a job, and shifting from IT into web development. Through hard work and serendipity, David found his way into a pioneering systems project for a top finance firm, his biggest challenge yet:
I had a lot of fear as to whether I could hold my own. My previous jobs were in little companies without exposure to the professional community. I had a sense of trepidation about whether I could compete. My education was not about the fundamentals of being a good developer. It took a lot to come up to speed. I read math, computer science, and algorithms textbooks every day on my way to work.
But I’m opinionated and vocal. I spoke up right away. We were struggling with a component of the software where we had to process a large amount of data quickly. Costs could rise exponentially because of a few more seconds in processing. I came up with an algorithm. It was a bit complicated, but it was beautiful in terms of its efficiency.
Being listened to by peers, having my ideas discussed and respected, boosted my confidence. Being exposed to people of different age levels and experiences helped me get over my fear. I was not behind anyone. I could challenge and assist engineers who had double or triple my experience.
David began to soar. He started working on a new business project that the firm was investing in with the goal of spinning it out. Its scope was beyond anything David had envisioned, one that aimed to beat the existing competitor:
We grew so quickly. We started with four, and we’re up to a couple of hundred developers now! It’s exciting that we’re able to explore, learn, and progress.
It was definitely my most complex project yet with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I realized that I can not only compete but exceed many of my peers. I’m a very good problem solver. I’m exceptional at pattern recognition, and I’m able to think abstractly.
I want to gain respect as the person who can figure things out. I would like to be one of the smartest people in the world!
A modest hero with a strong sense of self, David overcame every trial he faced on the way to vice president.
So What?
David didn’t start out to become a superhero. No one could have predicted where David’s journey would lead him. If anyone tells you it ain’t so, don’t listen.
The superhero’s journey is less about what you accomplish, though the trials are impossible by definition, than how you face the obstacles in your way. You’ll need raw talent and strengths, including ambition, curiosity, and creativity. You’ll need dedicated focus on an audacious mission with a stretch goal. You’ll need tenacity, perseverance, and resilience. In other words, you need grit, and a lot of it.
David had all that and more. Every challenge helped him face entrenched fears that he was not good enough. Each one taught him more about using his own strengths.
That’s why the hero’s journey zigs and zags. Stops along the way are not detours. They’re essential to your growth.
THE CITIZEN LEADER
Alessandra didn’t expect the leaders’ strong resistance. But by broadening ownership for the change she envisioned, she prevailed.
Hard-driving Alessandra grew up in Naples, Italy. Her parents worked in medicine, but Alessandra wanted something else. She left three companies before she finally found what she was looking for in the fourth:
I joined a consulting firm to learn about general management. I decided to try consumer goods next. As soon as I reached my sales target, the company left me without a challenge. So I joined another consultancy, but when I was about to turn 30, I realized it had no plan to develop female leadership. That’s when I came here. The shock of changing to a slow, industrial environment was great, but I put a lot of energy in, and after two years I was promoted. After three, I got into this leadership program.
Ambitious and committed, Alessandra fought for what she believed in—even though she stood alone:
I discovered that a product line had a bad cost structure compared to competitors. I found a 30 percent gap and thought it was a tipping point moment. I gathered the leaders, two levels higher up, presented my analysis, and suggested what should be done and why. For the first time, somebody had pointed out the elephant in the room. Normally, the group would be very vocal. This time, they were silent. It felt like I was pitting one group against another.
Afterward, a leader I had trusted called me to his office. He said, “You have to change the way you communicate. You are young. There was a lot of expertise in the room. You should not tell people what to do.” I felt knocked out. I lost my faith in what the leadership team could get done. It was clear they did not want to act. They always had excuses. Somehow, there were factions they did not want to break.
I was put in a corner for the next two weeks. It felt horrible going to work. Some people boycotted me because of the way I communicated and my intent to do something. I felt sad and also angry. My dreams of being in a place that valued innovation and teamwork were falling apart.
Still I kept digging, involving more people in the discussion. Somehow, I generated a big wave. Every time somebody challenged me, I went back and improved my fact base. My case got better, and more people became owners. It became my personal mission! The global CEO kept asking about this analysis. My boss was away, so I had to present it. Then the CEO reraised the issue and made the change.
He also recommended Alessandra for the global general manager program. A true superhero, Alessandra achieved what others saw but could not make happen.
So What?
Alessandra didn’t expect the leaders’ strong resistance. But by broadening ownership for the change she envisioned, she prevailed. Each new voice strengthened her case, and ultimately, the crowd caught the attention of the CEO.
Had the global CEO not intervened, perhaps Alessandra would have been silenced or ignored. We cannot know. Regardless, she learned that the organization is a network with different factions and hubs. Though collaboration slows it down, it creates ownership. Size does matter. One person is a dissenter, but a group is a groundswell for change.
Alessandra’s courage comes from her mission to improve things. She told me, “I would like to know if there is a way, globally, that this generation can change things faster than before. Is there a river where we are all going with the flow in the same direction?”
Sometimes it takes a junior woman, a citizen compelled to do the right thing, to wear the superhero’s cape.
THE COWBOY SHERIFF
You feel frightened, helpless, stripped of dignity. You can wait for a superhero to save you, or you can become one.
Travel was a fixture in Elizabeth’s life. That was fortunate, as it helped prepare her to embrace ambiguity and change:
I started to travel at a young age. My dad was invited back to China, to Guangzhou for three years. We stayed in Ohio with our mother, but we would visit China now and then. I flew to Canada on my own at 15. In college, I went to Ireland to study. I also went to Ecuador by myself and worked for the Salvation Army. I was thinking about what to do, and somebody showed me a photo of Iceland. I went the next day.
Travel set me up to cultivate curiosity. The more I got, the more it wasn’t enough. I got comfortable meeting strangers and having random conversations. It’s also a mentality to make every moment count—you have only one life.
So when life and work clashed in an epic battle, Elizabeth was ready. One of seven grads nationwide invited to join the rotation program for a consumer goods company, Elizabeth chose an office in the one city she had never visited. She was alone when she fell gravely ill. Over the next few years, Elizabeth battled for her life:
I was leaking protein through my urine, and no one knew how to stop it. The doctor was experimenting. He treated me as a guinea pig, giving me so many medications I could not tell cause and effect. I was in and out of hospital emergency rooms. I had a crippling disease, and no one knew what started it.
In The Shawshank Redemption, a character said, “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, get busy living or get busy dying.” I didn’t have energy to get off the couch, but I was still breathing and realized I could smile.
It’s humbling. I know I’m not invincible; I have an expiration date. I can go down in the blink of an eye.
At the same time, Elizabeth continued to work on an account sales team led by a long-standing bully:
She was “the Devil Incarnate.” I had just been diagnosed and had to go to the doctor. She said, “OK, we’re just in the busiest time of the year, but if you have to go, go!” I was crushed. I felt guilty, coming from a traditional Asian family where doing well at work is important.
I was also young and making a bunch of mistakes. She criticized every single one, including a document that never went to the client. She called me into the office, slammed the door, threw my papers in the air, and said, “What is this shit?!” I looked down for a second. She snapped her fingers in my face and said, “Look at me!” I left her office, snuck behind an office cabinet, and cried.
She was a bitch! The next day, she e-mailed me a to-do list, and then she stood over me as I tried to get what she asked for. I felt small and trapped. It was awful to feel stripped of dignity. She treated me like I wasn’t worth human respect. I had to remind myself every day, You’re alive. You choose your attitude. When people are that ugly, it exposes what you think about yourself and your need to grow a backbone.
When I finally told my mom, she said, “That’s not right. How dare she?!” The rest of the team had not called HR. They were afraid of retaliation. I wasn’t afraid. I told a senior person in our office. The head of HR flew in, and the bully was fired.
Elizabeth’s disease went into remission. She landed a great new job elsewhere and started planning long term, even more boldly.
So What?
It would have been natural for Elizabeth to give in. Instead, she retained her power, battling a crippling disease while standing up to a bully. That’s what a superhero does.
Everybody faces threatening challenges at work sooner or later. Negative events can trigger it: the business tanks, management executes a layoff, and out you go. You feel frightened, helpless, stripped of dignity. You can wait for a superhero to save you, or you can become one.
When the worst has already happened, you have nothing more to fear. Focused on what was in her control, Elizabeth saw that she could and should take action. Her downside risk was limited. Her new husband had health insurance. She had accepted the consequences. Elizabeth said, “When your health is affected, it’s never worth it. Get the hell out, even if you’re in your dream job!”
After cleaning up Dodge, that’s exactly what Elizabeth did.
THE CRISIS AVENGER
Once convinced of the right thing to do, be willing to fight.
To overcome the obstacle before you, be willing to flex your plan.
Growing up in Australia, Sam watched his father go from bank teller to finance entrepreneur, from rags to riches. His attraction to risk taking was reinforced by a love of adventure that included bungee jumping:
I love to go canyoneering—following a river down from a mountain. It’s a wonderful way to explore nature and test yourself. A couple of times, I came very close to not making it. Once, I had a broken leg and couldn’t escape a waterfall. My encounter with a life-and-death experience put work into perspective. It’s not life threatening. People who have encountered death handle stress better and have greater confidence.
I’ve always been fascinated by people who have beaten the odds. My father helped me realize that you can sit at a table where everyone agrees with each other and disagrees with you—and you’re still right. Your idea needs to test out in the real world, but it might not test out in the boardroom.
When Sam was asked to lead a new innovation team in the consumer goods company where he worked, he jumped:
My new boss said I seemed to be good at figuring this stuff out. I know now that the company leaders had no idea what they wanted. It was an important global business, large but least profitable, on a downward spiral, and neglected. The situation was so dire that incremental change would not turn things around. There had to be something radical.
It feels arrogant, but the vision and strategy was clear to me on day 1. Really, all roads led to one answer. I took a big risk, but I was able to counter every obstacle in our way. It was oddly motivating to have a challenge that I truly believed in. My contrarian nature found a productive outlet.
I fought the organization for about 18 months. We operated in the area between management actually saying “Yes” but no one saying “Stop.” I knew I was right, and I would find a way through the forest to get there, even if I had to drag the organization behind me. It was absolutely exhausting.
A senior executive approved the new strategy after each of the three levels below had approved it. Then Sam turned to his next assignment—and more obstacles:
My project went to the execution team. I was disappointed that they didn’t see what they were being handed. It was like handing over my baby. I started to focus elsewhere with more responsibility. I saw a different business challenge, but with a similar solution.
The new team voiced all of the same concerns. I felt like we had learned nothing as an organization. It was crushing. If you put enough people in the room, you’re going to get something really stupid. I learned that if you’re going to make sacrifices, make sure it’s for a cause you really value. People will never tell you that you were right and they were wrong. It was not a fairy-tale ending.
Six months later, I ended up in New York with a new role in global marketing. I want to focus on finding and fixing challenges, not just be a cog in the machine. I would like to be a free agent, battling crisis 100 percent of the time.
Sam’s superhero strategy delivered massive profit improvement. His career advanced continuously, with less than two years at each level.
So What?
Having a huge impact on the organization is thrilling, as Sam learned. Once convinced of the right thing to do, be willing to fight. To overcome the obstacle before you, be willing to flex your plan. Sam advised, “It doesn’t matter what plan you have as long as you’re heading in the right direction. Don’t get stuck on the plan.”
Battling years of inertia and active resistance to change takes its toll. Sam was able to persevere and recover by taking on intense physical challenges like rock climbing. He said, “Everyone has a finite amount of frustration that can go into their bottle. You have to empty it to start over each week.”
The most telling sign of a superhero is what he or she values most: being a free agent. Sam prized that more than anything—except for the next thrilling crisis.
THE DEMON SLAYER
Love is James’s superpower. Hope for making things better flows from it; so does optimism for the future.
Abandoned by his father and mother, James almost didn’t make it out of the neighborhood:
My father was out of my life before I finished elementary school. My mother suffered from mental illness and drug addiction. One day, my grandmother sat me down and said my mother had been discharged from rehab, but she didn’t come home. She had been my dream defender. I’d say, “Mama, I want to be a firefighter,” and she’d say, “Baby, that’s great.” No matter what, she was supportive.
After that, I stopped believing in the whole idea of dreams generally. I was about to give up when people came out of the woodwork and said, “How can we help?” They saved me from hopelessness. It helped me put traumatic loss and hardship in perspective. I realized early it should not have to take a divine conspiracy to help a frightened, lonely kid.
James’s résumé tops most, including a prestigious education; internships in the law, investment banking, politics; and great jobs. Perhaps it was his extraordinary experience of life that caused James to step off the “right track” and launch a mission-based startup:
Everybody with wealth and authority thought it was a terrible idea. We thought it was a great idea. If enough people tell you you’re crazy, you’re probably on to something. We did it on our own dime, camping in cow pastures in Montana, cold-calling local businesspeople, asking if we could help. They’re solving a problem on the ground—how can we make our community better?
I believe I have a stronger version of I’m awesome. The measure of this life has to be about much more than personal success.
After graduation from business school, James’s trauma resurfaced. His inner demons returned to destroy everything he had built:
The startup took off. I gave the school’s graduation speech. I was on the cover of a magazine. However, I was deeply aware of the cracks in my “vessel,” in pain and hurt and lack of forgiveness and fear and weakness, things I had been ignoring to keep going. I was struck by how much my personal issues affected my organization. For the first time I was forced to face it. I realized I had to take myself seriously to deal with the gap between our company’s success and how I was processing the stuff in my history.
Holy crap, what’s going on? It was one of the worst years of my life and one of the most important. I had nowhere to run. I did not have another job or school to go to. There was no going back home. This was real Life with a capital L.
James plunged to the depths. To save himself and the company, he turned to friends and prayer:
I believe things last as long as they need to for you to learn what you’re supposed to learn. I saw that most of my freakouts were driven by fear. So much was about self-worth. Close friends said, “How are you doing?” but I could not tell them the whole story. Then they said, “I’m there with you, not just for you,” and I realized I wasn’t alone. People are working through the same things.
I woke up in a cold sweat at night and wrote down everything I thought I was afraid of. They looked a lot smaller in writing. I needed tools, some perspective, and the space to allow myself to do the work that I needed to do. And then I started to put one foot in front of the other—tackling fear, loving it. Love is a practice. Self-love is a practice.
If you almost die, very quickly résumé virtues become irrelevant. If I die today, what’s the life I want to live and be judged on? There is no logic that I should be here. I’m scared shitless every day. I’m never going to be fearless. People who say they’re not afraid are total liars.
The trials James faced prepared him to take on superhero challenges. More than four years in, his startup is going strong and he is too.
So What?
In facing his internal supervillains—childhood trauma, adult fears—James began to untangle deadly patterns. Religion helped him, and good friends supported him, but love saved him. James’s favorite question when helping others is, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Courage is the ability to feel afraid and do it anyway.
Love is James’s superpower. Hope for making things better flows from it; so does optimism for the future. Love, hope, and optimism counter fear, but they also make profound change possible. James saved himself, yes. But his mission is much larger—to inspire business’s next generation and change the course of America.
Superhero stuff.
TAKING ON YOUR
SUPERHERO CHALLENGE
You may not feel ready to be a superhero. However, your mission is vital, and your back is against the wall. You make the decision to move forward. You face fear and steel yourself for the fight. With a fierce belief in the goal, you’ll stop at nothing. You draw on resources you didn’t know you had. With your team, you achieve what no one thought possible.
Superhero experiences are peak experiences. They entail long hours, unending stress, and extraordinary effort. And yet most top performers would like more of them. It’s what they’ll tell their colleagues, friends, partners, and children.
The people in this chapter were regular citizens who took on superhero challenges. Shannon could have kicked the can down the road, but she chose not to. David challenged himself to invent an elegant solution. Alessandra stood up to her leadership team. Elizabeth took on the office bully. Sam led a transformation, and James took on nothing less than the battle between love and fear, good and evil. Amazing.
The superhero challenge is the extreme version of all the other challenges combined. These recommendations will help you mitigate its severity.
Embrace the Mission Fully
Purpose may be present but disguised. You may know it, but not believe. You may believe, but not feel ready. Assess the situation with eyes wide open. The mission requires your full commitment to succeed:
• Assess the assignment. Test it in the following three ways.
Explore its source of meaning. Is this your chance to do the right thing for your company or community? Is it an opportunity to serve alongside great people? Is it a way to accelerate your development? One of these should be enough to greenlight your project.
Take the energy test. Is this challenge something you hardly have to think about because you’re so fired up? Or do you agonize about it because you think you should do it? There has got to be a “want to do it” in there. If your heart rate speeds up just thinking about it, that’s a good sign.
Assess the fit. Your background, work experience, leadership style, and personality may make you the ideal candidate. Without hubris, is this a challenge that you’re particularly well suited for? Or is this something that anyone could do? If you’re just a warm body, the other two tests must be positive to take you over the hump.
• Assess yourself. Superheroes may work part-time, but when they’re on the job, nothing else matters. That’s how you need to be, so gauge your commitment, which needs to be 100 percent—or more.
Estimate your capacity. Get ready for life in the high visibility, high risk, fast lane. If work-life balance is more your thing, be warned. Throw balance out the window and find ways to expand your capacity.
Measure your optimism. Superhero challenges take full conviction in what you’re doing despite all the unknowns. Skeptics will ask questions that raise doubt in your own mind. You’ll need conviction to find ways around those obstacles to reach the goal.
Establish your base of support. Superheroes need a few good people on their team. Likewise, identify well-placed supporters who believe in this cause and in you. Syndicate your decision with them.
Be a Superhero Every Day
You’re about to take on challenges bigger than you, requiring capabilities you may not yet have. This isn’t jumping out of a plane. You’re heading into space. You’re an astronaut now!
• Believe in the mission. When you do, everybody else will be more likely to believe in you. That’s the essence of leadership and the one thing you can never let go. You get to declare the vision, but you also have to believe in it so much that others feel safe following you.
• Sustain yourself despite the pressure. This is a pressure cooker situation that threatens to boil over regularly. Make sure you’re working on what really matters so that the priorities don’t overwhelm you. And take care of yourself. Health is now a requirement of the job.
• Get used to making mistakes and recovering quickly. With a project so complex, there is no way you can avoid every mistake. Get great at apologizing, repairing, and moving on. And find a coach a few years ahead of you, someone not stuck in the system. Your coach can help you navigate the beneficial, but also ugly, politics.
• Learn from everyone. People will be judging you and offering advice of every kind. Listen well but don’t feel obligated to follow every rule. You’re going to disappoint someone while in service to your mission.
• Recognize other people’s experience. Stand in their shoes and be a truly great listener. Take the time to build your team too. People stretch to higher performance if they find meaning in what they’re doing together.
Assume positive intent. Most of the time, people are not out to get you. If you genuinely help them and treat them with respect, they may return the favor. Others have to get through a few stages to believe—from surprise to skepticism, curiosity, and excitement. Stay with them. Skeptics may become your most loyal supporters.
Drop the emotion. Get curious about what others say. If they spout fallacies, use your fact base to counter them. It will be more likely that they don’t have the facts, in which case share yours without emotion. It’s a balance between the passion you feel and the logical thinking you need. Too much of either and you lose people.
• Face the office villains—and your fears. At some point, you have to confront the resisters, blockers, and naysayers to bring them on board or find a work-around. Before leaping into battle, understand them.
What you’re trying to do is hard. The people who have tried and failed were not idiots. We all forget that, criticizing those who don’t agree or block us. Find out what they did and why they think it failed.
Use the fears checklist to uncover what is triggering you. To recap: feeling invisible or ignored; feeling like a fraud or unworthy; feeling uncertain and lost; feeling like you are losing control or letting people down; feeling loss of freedom or autonomy; feeling powerless; feeling rejected, or abandoned; and feeling like you are the subject of or a witness to gross unfairness. When you’ve found your fear, get curious and reframe.
• Tap your sponsors. Your chances for success increase exponentially with a few senior people on your side. Everybody passes through the valley of despair. This is a great time to get some support—your sponsors can help you face fear and untangle old knots.
• Behave as if you’re always in the spotlight. Because you are, even when you don’t feel much courage or confidence. Turn to a trusted team member when you need to vent. There is a reason that Batman has Robin.
• Accept the unknown. The biggest risk you’ll face is failing to recognize when the plan is wrong. Stay focused on the goal and be flexible. You will make detours and side trips to accommodate others, and you’ll also be wrong a lot of the time. That’s OK as long as you’re generally headed in the right direction.
Know Your Exit Strategy
You’re facing twin dragons who guard the treasure: organization resistance and self-doubt. These dragons never die. If you capture the treasure, you’ll receive countless invitations to do it again elsewhere. Keep in mind that it’s hard to be a hero for long. Eventually, your winning streak will end. Or the dragons might overpower you, and then it’s better to abort the mission. In both cases, you need an exit strategy:
• Assess your danger. During a war, we risk life for the cause. But work is not war, even if it feels that way. If you feel like you’re fighting to the death, seriously consider leaving.
Check for warning signs. If you’re too far gone to know, ask someone to intervene. If you’re burning out, do something about it. If you’re in over your head, tell someone and get help. You do not have to go down with the ship.
Commit to your walk-away point. Predetermine the point at which you’re better off walking away instead of completing the mission. Answer the question, “I will walk away if [event] happens.”
• Prepare to ramp down well. Early on, talk to sponsors to identify your options for what’s next. It’s tempting to focus just on today, but remember your future.
• Navigate your career. You may have found that superhero work is exactly what you want. Or you may have enjoyed it as a one-time experience. Before you get the next request to be a superhero, have the necessary conversations to set people’s expectations.
• Ride out of town. Win or lose, heroes attract a lot of invisible arrows. You could save the town and still not be welcomed to stay. Prepare for the possibility of leaving before you have to. Your experience is invaluable to your next workplace. They will be delighted to embrace a proven superhero.
Peak experiences are exhausting. Take a breather after the dust settles. You’ll feel low from the crash as you withdraw from an adrenaline-fueled existence. Life without adrenaline feels flat and dull, but you must rest. The best way to do that is to be in calm waters—on vacation or in a more routine role.
Use this time to reflect on what you’ve learned about yourself. Renew your energy. If you can, slow down entirely. There is great joy in being present and open to what’s happening here and now. It’s also a gift to others, who want more of you.
Soon enough, you’ll swing into top gear, which may or may not entail being a superhero again.