CHAPTER 9
how to be divergent
Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning to control your fear, and how to be free from it.
—Veronica Roth, Divergent
My daughter Fiona—and all her middle school friends—were obsessed for a while with the dystopia that Veronica Roth creates in her book Divergent. In it, the characters are allowed to develop and display only one character strength: intelligence, courage, honesty, peacefulness, or selflessness. People who demonstrate more than one strength are considered “divergent,” which is seen as highly dangerous and threatening. The main character, Tris, is divergent—she is smart, brave, and selfless. Because the divergent are hard for the government to control, they are usually killed.
The appeal of Divergent to the middle school crowd is obvious, given the pressure that many teens feel to conform to a rigid set of standards set by their peers, parents, and schools. But I also see Roth’s dystopia as a commentary on the adult world we live in, where most of us are constantly comparing ourselves to three common, and powerful, archetypes that display and develop only one strength: the ideal worker, the intensely involved mother, and the provider father.
I don’t know anyone who has worked for a traditional business who hasn’t run up against our cultural notion of what journalist Brigid Schulte calls the ideal worker: the perfect employee who—without the distractions of children or family or, well, life—can work as many hours as the employer needs. Ideal workers don’t have hobbies—or even interests—that interfere with work, and they have someone else (usually a wife) to stay at home with sick children, schedule carpools, and find decent child care. Babies aren’t their responsibility, so parental leave when an infant is born isn’t an issue; someone else will do that. The ideal worker can jump on a plane and leave town anytime for business because someone else is doing the school pickups, making dinner, and putting the children to bed.
Most working parents can’t compete—in terms of sheer hours of work—with these ideal workers, and they’ve got additional archetypes to cope with: intensely involved mothers and provider fathers. The intensely involved mother doesn’t appear to work outside the home (if she does do paid work, it certainly doesn’t interfere with her mothering or volunteering in her children’s classrooms). The intensely involved mother always knows best. She was the one who breast-fed her children for years, after all, and so she (and she alone) knows what the babies need and when they need it. When her children reach school age, she becomes the ideal parent volunteer. She’s a room parent, fund-raising worker bee, pizza-day helper, field-trip driver. She juggles so many roles that she seems omnipresent on campus. Her children are shuttled from every ideal enrichment activity available and are enrolled in the best summer camps. She takes lots of pictures, diligently documenting her children’s carefully constructed childhoods, but she herself rarely appears in the photo albums. Her needs are seldom considered. How fulfilling she finds her job serving her family is not relevant.
Similarly, provider fathers—who focus on making as much money as possible for the benefit of their families yet rarely spend quality time with them—shame working dads who turn down promotions or take lower-paying work so they can spend more time with their kids.
Like the characters in Divergent, each of these stereotypical Americans can develop and display only one strength: the ability to work long hours, or the ability to be a great and selfless parent, or the ability to make a lot of money for the family.
But here’s the thing: The ideal worker is not necessarily ideal. Nor is the intensely involved mother or the provider father. Reams of research show that people who work long hours, to the detriment of their personal lives, are not more productive or successful than people who work shorter hours so they can have families and develop interests outside of work. And nothing in the research indicates that intensely involved mothers are more successful raising happy or high-achieving children than moms who invest in activities that are not 100 percent centered on their children. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that kids do better when they are given more autonomy. And we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that children benefit hugely from having an involved father—even when the father earns less money than he would if he worked more.
In other words, if we are to be our most productive, successful, and happy selves—if we are to find our groove in our work and our home lives—we must be divergent, as threatening as this is to our cultural norms and the people around us who strive to be ideal workers, intensely involved mothers, and provider fathers. Divergence is especially threatening to the ideal workers who still run many of our corporations and government institutions. As in Roth’s novels, people deeply wedded to the ideal archetypes will seek to control and, if necessary, discredit or undermine people dedicated to being good parents and good workers and community contributors and happy individuals.
To develop our multiple talents, we must stray from the herd of our cultural archetypes. As we know from Chapters 4 and 5, our nervous system is designed to keep us in a group, so straying from the herd can be terrifying and disorienting. In Divergent, the strong female main character, Tris, is forced to join a single-strength faction in order to hide her divergence. She chooses to become “dauntless”—the group that prizes bravery—even though she secretly knows that she also has a predisposition for the highly intelligent “erudite,” or the selfless “abnegation.” She knows that changing the world, and her life, will take a great deal of courage, and only when she has enough courage will she truly be able to help others or fully use her own intelligence.
Virtually every action or behavior I suggest in this book will, for some readers, require divergence from the herd, or courage, or both. Sometimes we need courage in our personal lives—to face a past trauma that is holding us back, or to demand more from (or leave) a mediocre relationship that is sucking the life out of us, or to insist that our partner help us with the child care or housework so we can get more sleep. Other times we need courage professionally, to tackle a major challenge, to risk making a mistake, to confront a co-worker who is blocking our progress, or to set out in a new career direction. Often (maybe always) we need courage to pursue the everyday changes that can get us into our groove. It can take courage to establish a gratitude practice or rules around smartphone use in our home. It takes pluck to love someone with our whole heart, and it takes bravery to forgive.
We will not find our groove by conforming to unrealistic ideals or outdated stereotypes. To find our groove, we must allow ourselves to be complex and divergent, to be our authentic selves. Authenticity in and of itself is a form of tremendous ease. It is easier—we ultimately have greater power and less stress—when we say “I don’t know” instead of faking an answer, when we tell the truth about our preferences instead of pretending to like something we don’t, or when we do the thing we want to do instead of the thing that others expect of us.
BECOMING DAUNTLESS
Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly, may be the best guide out there to becoming dauntless. She writes about remarkable research into the power of vulnerability and shame, where she defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” My friend Ben recently made himself vulnerable by applying to business school at the age of forty-three. Ben will have to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing whether or not he’ll be admitted and, if he is, if the financial investment will be worth it. Great athletes make themselves vulnerable every time they take a potentially game-winning— or losing—shot. Engaging inevitably means risking the game. And every parent I know is vulnerable because having children and loving them unconditionally exposes you emotionally.
Our minds seem to easily link vulnerability to weakness. But do we think that great athletes, or people who make major mid-career moves, or all the parents out there who are so emotionally exposed by the love they have for their children, are weak? Does their vulnerability make them look feeble, disappointing, or like a failure?
Turns out, it’s a big fat myth that vulnerability equals weakness. “Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable,” Brown writes. “Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And, yes, we’re taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.”
One reason that we perceive vulnerability as weakness is that vulnerability is at the core of all our emotions. When we feel something—and especially when we show our emotions—we expose ourselves. When we feel, we become vulnerable. And when we see emotions as weak or “girly” (an insult to grown women and men alike), we are also likely to conflate vulnerability with weakness.
Let me say this one more time: Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness even while it is a sign of exposure. Vulnerability is a sign that courage is at work. And the only way that we divergent people can survive is to muster the courage we need to be vulnerable.
But how do we do this? Below are several tactics for mustering courage to benefit from vulnerability—to reap the benefits from the ease that vulnerability ultimately brings. For it is only when we are vulnerable that we gain true intimacy and deep connections, when we are able to take the risks that we need for mastery. Only when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable—when we expose ourselves emotionally—are we able to experience profound joy and gratitude and inspiration.
Choose one or more strategies that resonate with you and start practicing!
JUST DO IT IMPERFECTLY
There are basically two ways to just do something imperfectly, and often you can choose a method that suits your style. If you are getting into a cold swimming pool, are you most likely to actually make it all the way into the pool if you dive right in, or will you get there by inching your way in slowly? How are you with Band-Aid removal? Do you rip it off fast or peel it off slowly? Even though we’ve all probably approached both tasks in both ways, we usually have a preference.
I’m the dive-right-in, rip-the-Band-Aid-off-quickly type. When I need to muster the courage to get into a new or scary arena, I know that I can’t inch my way toward something, or I’ll overthink things, change my mind, decide the water is too cold, and never end up swimming.
My friend Casey is afraid to pursue her career as an artist and writer. She feels stuck in her family business and can’t seem to muster the courage she needs to begin a career that speaks more to her creativity and huge heart than to her husband’s business acumen.
Casey is an inch-into-the-pool kind of gal. So in this case, she can muster the courage to pursue her long-term goal of making a living through her art by starting slowly. Opening the arena gate by talking to other artists and writers. Taking one step closer to the center every day by making a little collage or writing a paragraph or two. Working her way up to taking classes at night.
Either method is fine, as long as we actually get into the arena and start playing. What we can’t do is wait to get started “until we’re perfect or bulletproof” because, as Brown writes, “perfect and bulletproof don’t exist in human experience.”
See your next foray into doing something scary as what writer Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft.” Welcome the imperfection of this next attempt. Most great writers swear by this: All you have to do is get that crappy first draft down on paper, and you are more than halfway home. Shoot for a perfect first draft and you are screwed, though; most people are paralyzed by the impossibility of that task. The wise coach Martha Beck says this about welcoming imperfection into our lives:
Long experience as a profoundly flawed person has taught me this unexpected truth: that welcoming imperfection is the way to accomplish what perfectionism promises but never delivers. It gives us our best performance, and genuine acceptance in the family of human—and by that I mean imperfect—beings.
Ironically, when we walk into the arena embracing our imperfection—like the boy who decides to ask a cute girl on a date even though he’s pretty sure he’s going to stutter and say something stupid—we increase the odds that we will be successful. We remove the pressure on ourselves. We perform better, we win more friends, and we build our capacity for acting with courage. Life feels easier after we do something hard.
CONSIDER THAT YOUR FEAR ISN’T LEGITIMATE
Sometimes fear is more about excitement and thrill and passion than it is a warning that you are about to jump into a toxic waste dump instead of a swimming pool. As Maria Shriver writes in And One More Thing Before You Go, often “anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring…part of your agitation is just excitement about what you’re getting ready to accomplish. Whatever you’re afraid of—that is the very thing you should try to do.”
When we face our fears, we sometimes catch a glimpse of Marianne Williamson’s famous insight about fear:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you…And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
So look what you are afraid of straight in the eye. What is it that you are most scared of? Is it rejection? Ridicule? What is the very worst thing that could happen to you if your fear comes true? Can you handle that outcome?
Your self-grilling might go something like this coaching session between Martha Beck and Lissa Rankin, author of the New York Times bestselling book Mind Over Medicine. Rankin, a doctor much like work-life balance teacher Lee Lipsenthal, has rededicated her practice to teaching other doctors to become more holistic healers. One of Rankin’s biggest fears was of not being in total control of things. In particular, she had a paralyzing fear of not being able to control things in hospitals—a place where it is, of course, impossible to control every outcome.
Beck: So Lissa, what would happen if you [weren’t in total control] in the hospital?
Here’s what is great about this dialogue: Not only did Rankin uncover her actual fear and face it, but she was able to experience the way that her fear was telling her what she most wants. Although most doctors might quite legitimately fear losing their license, deep down Rankin did not want to keep her license. Although she didn’t want to lose it by making a mistake or hurting someone, she did give it up in order to focus full time on her doctor-training business.
Occasionally when we face our fear, we find that the “worst possible outcome” that we are so afraid of is actually the outcome that we are looking for!
SEEK A SMALLER POND
I have a friend, whom I’ll call Alan, whose wife wants him to be more romantic, but romance does not come easy to him; it is not, as he puts it, “in my bailiwick.” He’s frightened of the emotional exposure that occurs when he is expressive about his love for someone else; to him, the vulnerability of this emotional exposure seems to outweigh the reward of his wife’s satisfaction with their relationship.
One way for Alan to muster the courage to be more vulnerable in this arena, and therefore more romantic, is to start expressing his feelings in other ways with other people who don’t make him feel so exposed. I think of this as the big duck in a small pond strategy. Psychologists call it the “inoculation principle of graded exposure.” The idea is to create experiences that are outside your comfort zone (in the direction you need more courage) but are not so intense that they are super stressful. For example, Alan can:
• Tell his kids more specifically what he loves about them at bedtime.
• Talk about what he is grateful for at dinnertime, when perhaps the rest of the family also does this, and look for opportunities to express gratitude for other people. For example, by saying that he is grateful for his mother and all the ways she helps him be a better father.
• Verbally link the little thoughtful things he already frequently does for his wife to his love for her. He’s started saying things like, “I ordered you new printer toner today because I know you hate dealing with stuff like that and I love you and I wanted to do something nice for you.”
The key for Alan is to just do these things without overthinking them. If he pauses to “think of something really profound to say at dinner,” he makes romance feel hard again. The point is to practice in a smaller pond and let go of the outcome. By stepping into these smaller ponds daily, Alan is building the courage to be a bona fide romantic with his wife.
Similarly, another way to make our pond smaller when we are building courage is to set the bar very low, so success is guaranteed in the early rounds. My friend Vanessa doesn’t have a lot of athletic skills and has to (heavily) coax herself into going to the gym. When trying a new activity or class, she has no aspirations for herself other than just showing up and making it through the class. She can be terrible at the activity and still walk out feeling like it’s a win—which gives her more courage to head back the next day.
The idea is to muster the courage to do things that are initially hard for us so that we reap huge gains in the ease department. Alan may never find romance easy, for example, but his life is way easier when his wife is happy and his relationship is strong.
REMEMBER WHEN YOU’VE BEEN BRAVE BEFORE
Write down a list of times when you’ve shown real courage. List things you were afraid to do but are glad you did anyway. Note especially the things that you did imperfectly but are still very glad you did. Also note the times when you were forced to do something that made you very vulnerable (like when your spouse asked for a divorce that you didn’t want, or when you were pressured to speak for all your siblings at the funeral of someone dear to you all) but you showed tremendous courage anyway.
My friend Dan Mulhern, a leadership coach and professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, designed this “Analysis of a Scary Situation” exercise to help his students remember when they’ve been brave:
• Briefly, write or think about a situation or circumstance in which you felt afraid, and what you were afraid of specifically.
• Now, jot down or remember the action you took even though you were afraid.
• Write or think about what happened. Did what you feared materialize? If so, how? How did you respond? Were there unintended results or consequences that you could not have predicted?
• Now, look over your list again or mentally run through the times when you showed real courage. See, you are more courageous than you thought!
THINK COURAGEOUS THOUGHTS
Our thoughts profoundly influence what we feel and what we do. When we think about times when we’ve been a coward, we are likely to feel like a coward and then behave like one again. Or if we think about times when we’ve done poorly at something, we are likely to feel insecure and weak, upping the odds that we’ll actually do something insecure and weak.
It’s important to remember that the hard things we have to do or say are rarely what make us uncomfortable. It is the fear that makes us uneasy. Fear is the thing that actually makes actions hard, not the action that we think we are afraid of. Not doing something because we are afraid is actually not the easy way out in the long run. Though it might seem counterintuitive, it is finding the courage to try, or push ahead, or speak up, or make a change that will help us find our groove. When we do the hard thing, ultimately we find more ease.
That said, trying to control what we don’t think about doesn’t work. (Consider the old experiment where researchers tell their subjects not to think of a white bear: Most people immediately start thinking about a white bear.) It doesn’t work to say to yourself, “I have to stop thinking about all the ways that I might fail” or “I have to stop being afraid; it’s the fear that’s making this difficult” even though it is true that you won’t become braver by thinking about all the ways that you might fail.
Instead, take a two-pronged approach to thinking brave thoughts. First, simply pay attention. If you notice yourself having an insecure or an undermining thought, simply label it as such: “Oh, there’s a fearful thought.” For example, you are trying to get yourself to ask a question at a conference, but you are too afraid to raise your hand, and you notice yourself imagining that the presenter thinks your question is totally dumb. Say to yourself, That is a thought that will make me feel afraid to ask my question, and take a deep breath. Noticing your not-brave thoughts can give you the distance you need to not act according to that thought and the feeling it produces.
(Note: Don’t skip the “take a deep breath” part! Breathe in through your nose and fill the bottom of your lungs, pushing your tummy out. This can trigger your vagus nerve, which will have a calming effect.)
Second, actively fill your mind with courageous thoughts. Consider times when you’ve been brave before. Focus on how people just like you have done what you are mustering the courage to do. Think about how the last time you did it, it wasn’t that hard. Think about how you’ll regret it if you don’t do it. Think about how the worst-case scenario is something that you can deal with.
Simply reminding yourself what your long-term goals are is a way of thinking bravely. If you are depressed, for example, it can take real courage just to get out of bed in the morning, but your life depends on it. What are your hopes for your life? Remind yourself what you—and the world!—stand to lose if you can’t muster the courage. As Meg Cabot so wisely said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
Play around with the thoughts that make you feel most courageous, and the ones that lead you to act bravely. Then make the best thought your mantra. Write it on sticky notes that you place around you strategically (like the bathroom mirror, the kitchen clock, your computer screen, your car dashboard) so you’ll be reminded of your mantra when you most need it.
