CHAPTER TWO    

USE YOUR FEAR AND EMBRACE YOUR SUPERPOWERS

Every time you are tempted to react the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.

Deepak Chopra

Fear. A four-letter word with significant power. It prevents you from taking that powerful step through Door Number Four. As soon as you face a challenge or adversity, you freeze right where you are. You start to question your feelings and desires. What if you fail and nothing changes? Fear of failure paralyzes you. What if you are exposed for wanting more from your career and your life? What will people think? Fear of social ostracism obstructs you. What if you continue to think work sucks, but at least it is predictable? Fear of venturing from the known to the unknown stops you.

Mark McLaughlin, a neurosurgeon and author of Cognitive Dominance: A Brain Surgeon’s Quest to Out-Think Fear,¹ offers another perspective on fear. Fear is good. Fear, Mark McLaughlin says, forces us to pay attention. It compels us to decide and to act in the face of extremity. Fear is a survival mechanism. Fear is primal, ancient, inescapable. It drives us to make choices. Fear compels us to get clear on what matters. You can use it.

You are on a journey to transform any job into your dream job. Use your fear as a catalyst for action. It can help you clarify why your voyage matters and what’s at stake if you don’t choose to change how you work. Your mind is powerful and will try to keep you stuck in the “Work sucks” mantra. You can change that self-talk because you have two superpowers—choice and control—that you will unleash after you face your fears.

NAME AND CLAIM YOUR FEARS

Awake in my bed, terrified and paralyzed, I screamed for my dad. As he rushed into my bedroom, I screeched at him that Gremlins,* small, terrifying monsters, were hiding under my bed and in my closet trying to get me. Dad turned on the closet light and then shone a flashlight under the bed. There were no lurking Gremlins. At age eight, all I needed was my dad and a flashlight to make my fears go away. At 44, it takes a little more to alleviate my fears. However, the first step is still the same: turn on the lights and look under your bed. Because fear thrives in the dark. Unspoken and unacknowledged, it thrives, expands, and tightens its grip on you.

When you turn on the lights and look under the bed, you name and claim your fears. This is a quick and simple process. It typically takes my clients about five minutes to complete. However, don’t underestimate its power.

On a piece of paper or on a blank document on your computer or tablet, list your fears. What scares you about this journey to turn any job into your dream job? For example, what if your boss won’t budge? What if your request for verbal recognition is ignored? What if your efforts to find more purpose and significance in your job fail? What if you just can’t do it? Don’t stop until you have listed all your fears.

Once your list is complete, look at it. These are your fears. Claim them. Own them. Now as you see them as they are, simply black words on a bright white piece of paper, how do you feel? Are you as afraid and overwhelmed as before? Or did your body relax slightly? When you name and claim your fears, you put yourself back in the driver’s seat. Now you can use your fears.

In order to clarify why this journey to turn any job into your dream job matters, the first step is to focus on the here and now. Why? All change starts with an assessment of where you are right now—where you are beginning on your transformational journey. Use the statements below to assess your job. Read each statement and check if the statement is true or false for you.

Review your answers. This is the reality of your work today. If nothing changes, what’s at stake for you? How will your mental, physical, and spiritual health, your family, friends, and significant relationships, and your community be impacted if the questions you marked false do not change?

Now let’s look at the impact of not making changes in your day-to-day work.

For each question above that you marked false, fill in the blank for the statements below:

•  I feel ______________________.

•  I am not able to ______________________ for my family.

•  I am not able to ______________________ in my career.

•  I am not able to ______________________ in my community.

•  If I don’t change ______________________ , I will experience more of ______________________.

•  “If I don’t change ______________________ , I will experience less ______________________.

Here’s an example of this in action. If you marked Question 1 (“My job is designed to enable me to use my unique skills, abilities, and strengths”) false, you might complete this exercise as follows:

•  I feel apathetic, underutilized, invisible, unappreciated.

•  I am not able to provide the income and the lifestyle I want to provide for my family.

•  I am not able to be considered for training and development opportunities, get invited to participate in corporate-wide projects and initiatives, nor advance in my career.

•  I am not able to donate to my synagogue in my community.

•  If I don’t change how I work so I can demonstrate my unique skills, abilities, and strengths, I will experience more of the same dull, uninspiring, unfulfilling, transactional work. No one will know what I am capable of and how I can make an impact in the company.

•  “If I don’t change how I work so I can demonstrate my unique skills, abilities, and strengths, I will experience less opportunities for career advancement and professional development and less fulfillment and satisfaction in my work.

Your answers to the above questions are what’s at stake if you allow fear to stop you and you don’t choose to embrace your personal power to make a change and transform your job.

You know the starting point on your journey and why it vitally matters. Now let’s set your intention. An intention is the sense of purpose you bring to what you do. It is the real motivation and energy behind your actions.² For example, my intention for this book is to empower and equip people to own, love, and make their job work for them. What is your intention? Why does taking the bold, powerful step through Door Number Four matter to you? Write or type your intention statement for the transformational journey to turn any job into the job of your dreams. Then post it where you can see it. You now have a strong, visible reminder of your personal power and why this journey matters to you.

Just because you have an intention statement does not mean that you will not still feel fear. You will. Feel that fear. Then, with courage, take the next step toward your dreams. As I heard Oprah Winfrey say when I attended her 2020 Vision Tour in Charlotte, North Carolina, “The true meaning of courage is to be afraid—and then, with your knees knocking and your heart racing, take the leap anyway.”³ You can do this. You will not allow anything to stand between you and your dream. Not even your mind, which wants to keep you stuck in the familiar refrain of “Work sucks.”

HOW YOUR MIND IS KEEPING YOU STUCK IN A “WORK SUCKS” REFRAIN

As I nervously stepped into my first class as a college freshman, the first thing I saw was Professor Lorig. His hair and full beard were salt and pepper gray. Thick, round, black-framed glasses made his eyes look unnaturally large. His houndstooth tweed jacket with brown patches on the elbows was hanging over the back of a chair. And even though it was early September, he had on blue wool socks with his Birkenstocks. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “he looks like a college professor.”

Has this ever happened to you: you meet someone, and they look just like the picture you had of them in your mind? Or you talk to someone on the phone, never having seen their face, and when you meet them in person, you think to yourself that their voice fits them?

Why does this happen? Because of mental models, or schemas. I define a schema as a mental concept that informs what you can expect from a variety of experiences and situations. Schemas are developed based on information from your life experiences and then stored in your memory.

Your brain creates these mental models, or schemas, because they make it easier and faster to process and make sense of the millions of images, sounds, words, and smells that flood our senses every day. When I saw Professor Lorig for the first time, my brain rapidly absorbed the visual image of him and then matched it up with the schema I had in my brain for “college professor.” While helpful at times, mental models can keep us stuck in old patterns and old beliefs.

We all have mental models about work and being an employee. Many of these were formed early in life as we watched our family members, teachers, and other adults in our lives go to work. Some of these mental models may be neutral, like the one I had about college professors, but others can be positive or negative. All of these have conditioned us with beliefs about work. Our goal is to change the negative mental models we currently have that keep us stuck, unfulfilled, and disengaged at work.

To create the professional life you want and change what you have been conditioned to negatively believe about work, your first step is to pay attention to your brain in action. For example, when you drive your car to work, you turn on a specific sequence and combination of neurological networks. These networks are clusters of neurons that work together as a community because you’ve done that particular action numerous times. Each time you drive your car to work, the “how to drive a car” community of neurons fire together. According to neuroscientist Dr. Joe Dispenza, the more you repeat a thought, choice, behavior, experience, or emotion, the more those neurons fire and wire together and the more they will remain intertwined.⁴

When you keep thinking the same negative thoughts about work such as “I can’t be happy at my company,” “No one recognizes and rewards me for my knowledge and contributions,” “I don’t have any control over my time or my work,” or “I’m not challenged,” you hardwire your brain into a “Work sucks” pattern even if these thoughts are true only some of the time.

The problem is that your brain becomes an artifact of your past thinking. It becomes easier to automatically think in the same habitual ways than to challenge your past assumptions. And if you repeatedly feel the same emotions over and over again (like anger, fear, frustration, or sadness), it’s like you’ve added superglue to these patterns. According to Dispenza, emotions are the language of the body, so when you combine emotions with your negative thoughts, you are conditioning your body into the past.⁵ And this makes it very difficult to be joyful, fulfilled, and engaged in the present moment at work.

So, what does this look like in your life? It’s Monday morning and your alarm jolts you awake. Your first thought is, “Ugh, it’s Monday again, and I have to go back to work”. You get out of bed, and immediately your thoughts are on overdrive. Work is boring, your boss doesn’t appreciate you, your cube mate is a complete jerk, and the breakroom smells. These thoughts are so deeply wired with emotions that before you even brush your teeth, anxiety, irritation, and/or sadness floods your body.

Then, as you continue your morning and make your coffee, dress, and drive your usual route to work, the negativity continues. When you arrive, you turn on your computer, grab your notebook, and head to the conference room for your first meeting of the day—which you dread. Meetings, email, more meetings, and more email fill your day until it’s time to go home. You drive home the exact same route you took to work. You cook the same food for dinner, watch a TV show, and get ready for bed like you always do—wash your face, brush your teeth, and put on your pajamas. Then you get in bed and turn out the lights. The day is over, and tomorrow it starts all over again.

If you repeatedly do the same routines, they will become a habit. Dispenza defines a habit as a “redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that you acquire through frequent repetition.”⁶ The result? You are living on autopilot. You’re unaware of what you’re doing and why.

How often don’t you remember your drive to work because you were rehashing in your head what your boss said to you two days ago? Or maybe you email and text while talking to a colleague and later in the day forget what you agreed to do for her. These unconscious behaviors prevent you from living in the present moment. And because you are not in the present moment, but mired in the past, you are keeping your dreams and goals out of your reach, asserts Dispenza.⁷ You can’t create a work environment that contributes to your contentment, joy, and engagement.

However, once you are aware of your unconscious behaviors, you can create your new future instead of dreaming of escape.

It’s time to stop just “getting through the day” so you can make it to happy hour on Friday afternoon. Stuck in the past, existing in an endless loop of negative thoughts, is no way to live—especially if your autopilot runs on the emotions of fear, sadness, or unworthiness.

You want to own, love, and make your job work for you, and you have everything you need inside you to make this a reality. Your next step is to identify where you may have forgotten that you—and only you—have the power to transform your job into the job of your dreams.

YOUR SUPERPOWERS: CHOICE AND CONTROL

“You’ve forgotten your superpowers,” I said to Yvette, my coaching client and the chief operating officer of a large transportation company. As soon as the words left my lips, I cringed. Who talks to executives about superpowers? Even though we had worked together for six months, she was going to think I had completely lost my mind.

Yvette’s business and team had grown rapidly, and with that growth came challenges. However, Yvette was not leading, nor navigating the difficulties well. Yvette blamed the challenges with the West Coast expansion on the tight labor market in California and her challenges with Sundeep, the CFO, by telling me he did not like working with women.

Yvette was trapped in a downward spiral. She had what psychologist Julian Rotter calls an external locus of control. Yvette believed that her success or failure was controlled by other people, environmental factors, chance, or fate—and she was stuck. She was so stuck that she considered quitting. She couldn’t see how she had choice and/or control in each of these situations.

It was time for Yvette to lean into her superpowers: choice and control. Why? Because these superpowers imbue you with the confidence and knowledge that the only person you can change is yourself. They enable you to be a victor in your life. Victors have what Rotter calls an internal locus of control and believe that their success or failure is due to their own efforts. Victors know that their power is through the choices they make and the control they take over their lives. They know that they are in the driver’s seat of their life. And they know that they “have a piece of the action,” as my dear friend Gail likes to say.

You and only you can change your life. You have the power. You have the knowledge, skills, and ability to create the professional life you want. You have the superpowers of choice and control. It’s time for you to dust them off and own their strength. It’s a waste to spend time and energy blaming your office’s culture, technology, your boss, your industry, market conditions, your team members, your commute, or the drab office building you work in as the reason or reasons you’re not satisfied, stimulated, and engaged at work.

After I blurted out that Yvette had forgotten her superpowers, I asked: “Where have you succumbed to believing that you don’t have a choice and everything is out of your control?”

As she sat back in her white leather chair, resting on the pink fringed cushion that took up most of her seat, Yvette burst into tears. “Carson, it was easier to just blame all of the problems on everyone and everything else. It’s scary, hard, and overwhelming to face the fact that I have both contributed to the challenges and must be part of the solution. It was just easier to abdicate the power of my choice and control in each of these situations.”

Yvette sat silently for a moment with her tissue in her hand. Then she said, “I’ve been telling myself a lot of stories.

“The story I’m telling myself about Deon, who leads the West Coast, is that he is so new he doesn’t really know what to do,” she continued. “Also, I think I can do it better. And Sundeep, well, I find him abrasive and arrogant, so I have limited my interactions with him, which I see now has only made our accounting situation worse.”

As soon as Yvette said out loud how she had contributed to her company’s challenges, she brought them into the light. We had cracked the armor she had put up to protect her ego. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, “Cracks are where the light can shine into places that are dark, scary, and vast.”⁸ Now she could see the stories for what they were—excuses to protect her ego and sense of self. In the light, they did not appear so overwhelming.

“Yvette,” I said, “Often it is fear that is keeping us stuck. And fear is nothing more than a lack of faith. What do you lack faith in?”

A fresh stream of tears rolled down Yvette’s face as she said, “What if I’m not good enough? What if I don’t know what will work on the West Coast? What if I can’t train Deon, and what if I can’t work through my dislike of Sundeep?”

It was the familiar refrain of “Am I worthy?” and “Am I good enough?” I had asked myself this too many times to count. And I had heard it from every one of my clients at least once during a coaching engagement.

“So, what do you want to do now? What is one step you can take to know that you are good enough? And what is one step you can take to start to address each of the challenges you are facing?”

Yvette paused for a moment and said, “First, I’m going to go back to my five-minutes-a-day journaling practice where I write down three things I’m grateful for, five things that I did well that day, and one insight I had about my leadership. I found this very helpful when I did it every day. I’ll journal before I leave the office each afternoon. I will also schedule a meeting with Sundeep to discuss how I can help his team achieve its goals and meet with Deon and develop a training plan for him so I can teach him how to lead his team.”

Yvette had claimed her superpowers. She was a victor in her life.

Now, let’s claim your superpowers so you can be a victor in your life.

We’ll use the same steps Yvette followed to recognize and unlock your superpowers.

Unlock Your Superpowers: Step 1

The first step to unlock your superpowers is to sharpen your powers of self-awareness. This is your ability to observe your own behavior. One of the most powerful ways for you to become both the observer and the observed is through introspection and reflection. Reflect on the following questions:

•  What resistance do you have to being curious about your own behavior? What do you need to support you as you become an explorer of your own behavior?

•  What have you noticed triggers you to a place of “Work sucks”?

•  When you are in this place of “Work sucks,” what do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? How would you describe your emotions or emotional state?

•  When you are in this place of “Work sucks,” are you in a specific situation? Does it occur with specific people? Does it occur at a specific time of the day, week, or month? What specific external conditions are present?

•  How can you become more self-aware? For example, ask yourself throughout your day, “How am I feeling right now? What do I think might be driving that feeling?”

It can be helpful to come back to these questions as you read the rest of this book to continue to hone your ability to be self-aware. Self-awareness is an essential skill for you to turn any job into your dream job.

Unlock Your Superpowers: Step 2

The second step to unlock your superpowers is to recognize that you are in the driver’s seat of your life. You exert your power through the choices you make and the control you take over your life. Reflect on the following questions to identify where you have abdicated your power:

•  Where have you blamed your professional dissatisfaction on other people or situations?

•  Where have you ignored or denied your professional discontent, frustration, or unhappiness rather than acknowledge it to yourself?

•  What has been the impact on you mentally, physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually when you have abdicated your personal power?

Once you recognize that you have renounced your superpowers of choice and control, you are ready for the third step: to explore the stories you tell yourself.

Unlock Your Superpowers: Step 3

Stories are tricks of the ego to maintain your self-esteem. However, they do the opposite. They keep you stuck in a powerless state that undermines and slowly erodes your confidence. Think about the questions below to help you identify the stories that are keeping you stuck:

•  What’s the story you’re telling yourself about your job?

•  What’s the story you’re telling yourself about your relationship with your boss, coworkers, or teammates?

•  What’s the story you’re telling yourself about the projects you work on, your position in the company, and your influence within the organization?

•  What’s the story you’re telling yourself about your professional development, growth, and career advancement opportunities?

•  What’s the story you’re telling yourself about the value, meaning, and purpose in your work?

Now that you have identified your stories, the final step is to face your fears one more time.

Unlock Your Superpowers: Step 4

In this step you will explore how fear, or a lack of faith in yourself, prevents you from claiming your superpowers. Reflect on the four questions below to address the lack of faith you have in yourself and identify how you can overcome your fears:

•  What do you lack faith in that prevents you from believing that you can change your professional life?

•  Is the root of your fear in the prior question, “Am I worthy?” Or “Am I good enough?”

•  What will it take for you to be the victor in your life?

•  What will you do to embrace your superpowers of choice and control?

You are ready. Now is the time to let your superpowers shine.

Fear compels you to get clear on what matters. Use it as a catalyst for action. Let it focus your head and heart on why your journey to transform your job matters and what is at stake if you don’t choose to change how you work. You have superpowers—choice and control. No one can take them away from you. You are always at choice. You control how you think and act. Everything you need is inside you right now to turn an unfulfilling, unhappy work life into a vibrant, significant, joyful one. Allow your superpowers to shine brightly so you can create the job of your dreams.

Walk confidently through Door Number Four.

* The Gremlins under my bed were inspired by the 1984 movie Gremlins. In the movie a father buys his son a ”mogwai,” an adorable, cuddly animal, for Christmas. The son is warned to never expose his pet to bright light or water or to feed him after midnight. Of course, all of this happens, and this delightful, fluffy animal turns into a terrifying gang of creatures that destroy an entire city.