PIVOT POINT: Fear is at the heart of every nonpivot.You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
BY 2008, Kristina Paider had, by most definitions, arrived.
After years of hard work, she’d achieved all the things she’d aimed for: a senior leadership position with a sexy hotel real estate company, a six-figure salary, and a professionally decorated condo with a Chicago skyline view that stretched from the Hancock Tower to the Sears Tower. Life was good.
Except it wasn’t. Not really.
“I was spending twelve-plus hours a day in a six-by-six-foot cube,” said Kristina, “constantly rushing, battling corporate bureaucracy and nine-month winters. I hated it.”
Hate is a strong word. But for Kristina, it was true. What good is a skyline view when most of your waking hours are spent in a cubicle? What good is a prestigious position when it means exhausting yourself day after day with no end in sight?
The answer is that there is no good in it. She was right to hate it. Kristina, like millions of others just like her, was dying a slow death.
By 2013, though, Kristina had already begun to pivot. She’d left her leadership job in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of writing, along with new work. But over time she discovered that she’d succeeded only in trading one life for another similar one. “It was like a trial reinvention,” she recalled. “I only replicated what I had in Chicago with slightly warmer weather. It was another model where I worked all the time, so it wasn’t really working.”
Money was getting short, and something needed to change. Making the leap, Kristina sold everything, cashed in her corporate air miles, and set off on a trip around the world.
As Kristina had been trying to reinvent her life, however, she had developed an inexplicable fear of water. “I was cliff diving in 2003,” she recalled, “and I emerged from a jump gasping for air. And I was looking around, going, ‘What the heck is going on here? Is there some moss that I’m allergic to?’ I was looking all over the place, and someone looked at me and said, ‘You’re describing a panic attack.’ And I thought, ‘How can I be panicking?’ ”
How indeed? Kristina had grown up in the mountains, around water. She’d been a self-proclaimed “fish” since the the age of two. It made no sense. Yet there it was. Over time, she’d gone from cliff diver to someone unable to get into any sort of pool or ocean past her knees. She’d developed a fear that wasn’t just affecting her life but that she simply could not understand.
Everyone feels fear at some point. It’s a part of every pivot. To even consider pivoting, let alone actually doing it, we have to talk about fear. Spoken or unspoken, fear is always there. Whether we articulate it in the form of “What will people think?” or “How will I make ends meet?” or whether it hides just below the surface of conversation like a predator waiting for our first misstep, fear is always there.
But even to say that fear is a part of every pivot is to understate its power. It’s also—and this is perhaps more important—at the root of every nonpivot.
PIVOT POINT: Fear is at the heart of every nonpivot.
By nonpivot, I don’t mean an unsuccessful pivot. That’s a different thing entirely. To attempt to pivot but not make it on the first try means that you faced down at least some fear. But to never try at all? That’s 100 percent pure fear-based. Make all the excuses you want—the economy, your kids, your lack of a degree, your lousy boss, the transmission on your car—but don’t fool yourself. A pivot that never starts was blocked by one thing, and one thing only: being afraid.
Fear is the elephant in the pivot room. It’s the single biggest barrier to change, yet it’s the one that people avoid the most and understand the least.
The reason fear plays such a dramatic role in our pivot process isn’t that it blocks our actions. You’re going to learn how to do just that—act even while feeling fear—in the pages that follow. The reason fear shuts the process down so effectively is that it is a huge obstacle to clarity. It’s a roadblock to deciding what we want and how to get it.
It’s impossible to know what you want if fear is obscuring your vision of your future. It’s impossible to see and choose the next step on your path if your view is clouded by anxiety. It’s impossible to reach even a fraction of your potential without dealing with fear.
When you identify and address your fear, you will find clarity. With clarity, you can pivot.
At first glance, Kristina’s growing phobia seemed unrelated to her pivot. After all, what could a fear of water have to do with the anxieties of changing careers? As it happened, though, the two were quite closely linked.
Before we go into that, though, we need to look at why fear exists in the first place.
According to brain researchers, fear is a product of some of the oldest regions of the brain—the instinctual, unconscious parts way down deep inside that evolved earlier than the outer cerebral cortex, which allows us to be rational and (we think) makes us so darn smart.
When we hear a bump in the night, for example, that sound is received and decoded by our “old” brain in the amygdala, sometimes called the guard-dog part of the brain. It makes a split-second decision: Is this a threat? The outcome of that decision can then trigger a cascade of neurochemical and physical changes. Beneath the level of your conscious thought—in fact, faster than your conscious thought—the bump in the night activates the fight-or-flight response. Your heart beats faster to pump blood to your muscles, the hair on your body stands up to make you look larger, you begin to sweat and breathe more rapidly.
For our ancestors who developed it, this response let them perceive and respond to threats faster and survive. Survival meant they could live long enough to reproduce and pass their super fear response on to their offspring. We’ve inherited this highly attuned survival response. Now we have to learn how to adapt it to our present environment.
This is the take-home message of how fear works: It’s a response to a perceived threat, it’s automatic, and it’s wired into us from the evolution of hundreds of thousands of years. All told, it’s a pretty sensible explanation, but the important word here is perceived. Our fear response is based on our perception of the world.
But what exactly are we perceiving that’s so threatening when we think about pivoting? Unless your pivot involves BASE jumping or becoming a Navy SEAL, you’re probably not in much mortal danger. If you’re Kristina Paider, a competent and experienced swimmer and lifelong water enthusiast, what’s the mortal danger of standing ankle-deep in water?
The answer is that there isn’t any. You’re not in mortal danger when you pivot, any more than you’re in mortal danger when you stand up to speak to an audience, ask someone out on a date, or negotiate with your boss for a raise—all things that are practically guaranteed to evoke at least some fear response.
But what you are in is emotional danger. And your emotions and your physical body are inextricably linked.
While our days as roaming, vulnerable hunter-gatherers are behind us, all of the fear machinery is still there. It’s still functioning beautifully. It’s a fear factory sitting idle, waiting to be put to use. The problem is that this factory can start up faster than you can blink and change the course of your entire life.
With limited physical threats in our lives, our fear machinery is more than ready to be put to use on more subtle, but no less scary, emotional threats. And pivoting is emotionally scary. Here are just a few of the “threats” that fire up our brain chemistry and activate the fear response:
• What if people laugh?
• What if I lose my money?
• What if I fail?
• What will my parents/friends/spouse think?
These fears represent little physical threat, but they do represent significant emotional threat. Simmering on the back burner behind every pivot, they are far less tangible than heights, spiders, or water but, in many ways, far more serious. It’s possible to get through life successfully without making friends with a tarantula. But to pivot you have to face your fear of change.
We’re all afraid. We all have the same equipment, same evolution. When we hear the noise downstairs in the middle of the night, our hearts all beat faster without our choosing it. But most of the things we fear in pivoting—I’m not good enough. I might fail. People won’t love me—aren’t the burglar downstairs. They’re not a sudden jolt of startling, uncontrollable fear. They’re something different. But we still perceive them as dangerous.
Why? What’s the harm in even thinking about a career change or writing a novel?
The answer is that although there’s no real physical harm, there’s a perceived emotional one. Our pivot fears are emotional, manufactured fears that we create over time. They are, in essence, fear stories.
At the heart of your fears about pivoting is a story. The concerns about money, the worries about what people will think, the clinging to security—they’re all just parts of the story.
The story, if you were to write it down, is absurd. It’s unlikely, exaggerated, and in many cases almost comical. I’ve met people who can’t pivot because they’re worried about where they’ll shop if they change their lives. Yet we tell ourselves our story so many times, and in such vivid detail, that we really believe that it’s true. It becomes not just a story but a dangerous reality—something to be feared. The story itself, no matter how unrealistic, plays perfectly to our danger-oriented minds. It becomes a foregone conclusion, and we become afraid.
That means that, in order to change how we deal with fear, we have to change the story.
Like “real” stories in books and movies, comedies and dramas, fear stories have common elements: an inciting incident, a hero and a villain, a plot in which they pursue each other, and a climax.
The same applies to your story. Even though you and your life are unique, your fear story shares the same elements as many others. When it comes to pivoting, there are four characteristics common to all fear stories.
Fear is an evolutionary adaptation. A jolt of fear and its subsequent rush of physiological changes in the body gave our ancestors an extra edge. In other words, it paid to be scared.
But times have changed. Now our personal safety is rarely at risk, yet we still have all the fear wiring. The result is that our fear response is firing in response to things that really aren’t that dangerous. For example, although it’s one of the single greatest fears in modern life, it’s hard to make a case that public speaking is dangerous. Unless you’re a high-ranking public official, standing at a microphone is pretty safe stuff. There’s no risk at all, yet for many people the thought of even making a wedding toast is scary.
The same is true when you begin to pivot. The thought of changing your work, taking a financial risk, or moving to another country can send your adrenaline levels skyrocketing. Yet you haven’t actually done anything—you’re just thinking about it.
That’s the first lesson: Just because you’re afraid doesn’t mean things are dangerous.
PIVOT POINT: Being afraid to pivot doesn’t mean you’re in danger; it just means you’re approaching something new.
But pivoting, by its very nature, is about doing something new with your life. And that means that the fear you feel is a sign that you’re on the right track.
PIVOT POINT: Fear of pivoting is more likely a sign of clarity than of danger.
The original purpose of fear might have been to save your life. Now its purpose is to change it.
Every story needs a hero. And when it comes to your fear story, you don’t even have to invent one—the world has already done it for you. Fictional books and movies are filled with fearless, undaunted, utterly confident protagonists who always know what to do and feel no qualms about doing it. And in the real world? We paint our heroes with the same brush. The risk-taking entrepreneur with the “fail faster” mantra. Your successful friend who extols the virtues of bravery. They’re all playing the part of Fearless Hero.
The problem is that it’s all a lie. The Fearless Hero is the unicorn of pivoting—a mythical creature that exists only because we invented it. It’s the part of the fear story that says, “People who do brave things aren’t afraid. They just don’t feel the fear, and that means they can act.”
That’s nonsense.
What’s essential to understand about fear is that everyone feels it. With the exception of people with rare conditions or injuries that affect the amygdala, we’re all stuck with the same evolutionary inheritance: We get scared sometimes.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that way when we’re reading stories of great transformation or accomplishment. We tend to think of those people as extremely brave, or perhaps extremely reckless. We attribute their success to an inability to feel fear, when that’s not, in fact, the case.
In the dozens of interviews for this book, almost every pivoter mentioned being afraid. They were all anxious at one point, all nervous about what would happen. They were scared, uncertain, and fearful. Just, I suspect, like you.
The idea that people who dare to live their dreams are fearless is nonsense. Everyone is afraid. The difference is that some people pivot anyway.
PIVOT POINT: Everyone is afraid. The difference is that some people pivot anyway.
By believing in the Fearless Hero as part of our fear story, we also fall into yet another part of the fear story: the idea that courage might be waiting for us out there like some made-to-order medical treatment. If only we could get the prescription, we’d be brave enough to pivot.
It turns out that courage isn’t something that’s granted to a lucky few so that they can act bravely. As the Cowardly Lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz learned, courage is something you find by acting in the face of fear.
In truth, you are far more capable, intelligent, and powerful than you have ever imagined. You truly have no idea what you’re capable of until you try. And when you do try, like the Lion, you’ll discover that you were brave all along. You just never gave yourself a chance to prove it.
Like waiting for the perfect moment to change your life, waiting for the day when you’re not afraid is a part of the fear story. If you’re waiting for the day when you feel brave, you’ve got a long wait ahead. Bravery isn’t the feeling you get that allows you to take action. Bravery is what comes after. It’s the tiny seed of confidence that grows a little more each time you take action toward your pivot.
Stop waiting to feel brave. There’s no such thing as a fear-free pivot. Everyone feels fear at some point. The question is: Are you willing to deal with it?
PIVOT POINT: There are no fear-free pivots.
Fear stories can be like runaway trains that always arrive at a missing bridge. If I try to start a business, we tell ourselves, I’ll have to spend my savings. Then I’ll go bankrupt. Then I won’t be able to pay my bills. Then I’ll lose my home. Then I’ll have to live on the streets.
Then I’ll probably die.
That’s an absurd story. But in one form or another, this is the story we’re telling ourselves: that some unlikely and distant worst-case scenario is almost certain to happen.
Fear stories are disproportional. The stories we tell ourselves are unrealistic, and the risks are exaggerated beyond all common sense. The risks in our fear stories become like the action hero who falls a dozen stories, dusts himself off, and then manages to shoot all the bad guys while backflipping onto a motorcycle. There’s just no way that’s going to happen.
But that’s the way it is with fear stories. They’re all about exaggerating danger. They’re the result of our minds racing down paths of negative possibilities because that’s what our minds evolved to do.
But your mind is just as capable of racing down positive paths. Paths of growth, success, and prosperity. A future of hope and possibility. Dreams that, with a little gumption and a lot of elbow grease, might just come true.
PIVOT POINT: Fear is almost always based on unlikely extremes.
On the north coast of the Dominican Republic near Puerto Plata is a place called 27 Waterfalls, where the Río Damajagua winds its way under the rain forest canopy in a series of spectacular cascading falls and sparkling limestone pools. For a fee, tourists can hike to the top and work their way down by sliding and jumping into pools from heights of almost thirty feet.
Not only was the Dominican Republic the first stop on Kristina Paider’s reinvention tour, but 27 Waterfalls would turn out to be the perfect place to face her irrational and growing fear. “I’m either going to succumb to cardiac arrest,” she decided, “or I’m going to desensitize myself to the water and get back into it. That was my game plan.”
Hiking with a group of strangers, Kristina reached the starting point for the descent. From that point, she and her group began to work their way down a series of increasingly tall waterfalls, jumping off the tops of eight or nine into deeper pools of water below.
As they began to go from fall to fall, Kristina began to have panic attacks with each jump. “My group saw that I was having a little problem, because I kept jumping in and then, you know, coming out, and it was just this dramatic thing that I could not control.” Despite that, Kristina worked her way through a series of jumps—and panic attacks—until she arrived at the Big One—a nearly thirty-foot plunge from a rock jutting out into space over the water below.
To make the jump required a leap outward, away from the rock face. Kristina’s group suggested she go first, but each time she approached the edge, she backed down. Eventually, her entire group jumped, one by one, leaving just Kristina at the top.
After a few more failed attempts, she gave in. “Finally I said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ ”
As she turned to walk away, though, her failure settled on her like a blanket. “I took a step away,” she recalled, “and there was such a heavy burden of disappointment and defeat that I did not resonate with. I literally pivoted on that foot, and I just sort of looked away and I just said, ‘That is not who I am.’ ”
And she jumped.
When Kristina came to the surface, the first thing she thought was I’m breathing! I’m alive!
In that moment, her fear was gone. “It’s hard to put into words,” she said. “I was in disbelief.”
Kristina would go on to make the Dominican Republic her home. Now she lives there most of the year, working as a writer and consultant. She’s been featured in publications from the Wall Street Journal to Forbes and appeared on CNN. She’s been endorsed by CEOs on seven continents. And the only rushing she does now is to beat the tide so she can walk on the beach to her next appointment. She beat her fear, and she pivoted, too.
But were the two things connected? Did facing her fear change her pivot?
“Absolutely,” she said. “You have that moment with yourself where you say, you know, even ‘This is who I am’ or ‘This is not who I am.’ And with such strength and such resonance. It doesn’t change who you are, but it clarifies who you are—and who you’re not.”
There’s no better example of rewriting a fear story. In that split second of deciding who she was not, Kristina recast herself in her own developing pivot story. In deciding that being afraid was not who she was, she rewrote the story she’d been telling herself, in increasing detail, for years. As she now says, “I’m all in to jump until I can’t jump anymore.”
You may not have a tangible fear like Kristina’s. A fear of water, or snakes, or heights. But you undoubtedly have fears, and they are undoubtedly affecting your ability to pivot.
Tim Jones experienced his fair share of fear when he decided to reinvent himself and his architecture business. Tim was particularly worried about money, a fear common to many people making a pivot.
“I knew I had to do something,” he said, “but there was so much fear.” Rather than hide from the fear, though, Tim, like Kristina, decided to face it down.
Plagued with worries about money, he decided that rather than not think about what might happen, he would, like Kristina, dive headlong into it. Only, in his case, his dive would be mental and emotional.
“I adopted a childlike faith. I said, ‘You know, I’m just going to go for it. What’s the worst that will happen? You’ll fail. Okay, it’s not going to kill me. I’ve failed before. What’s the worst that will happen? You’ll go bankrupt. Okay, well, Walt Disney was bankrupt. Donald Trump was bankrupt. So what?’ And so I would ask myself these questions. And I would walk through it. I would see it until the end.”
Tim’s gradual exploration of the worst-case scenario was much like Kristina’s gradual exploration of higher cliffs and deeper pools. By mentally preparing himself for the worst-case scenario, he began to build a new “muscle”—a muscle that could lift the weight of fear enough for him to take action.
“When I moved into my office here, I couldn’t see the rent and the payroll and all of it. I said, ‘Tim, just go for it. The worst that will happen is I’m going to have to move back home to my home office, where I was perfectly happy. If that’s the worst that’s going to happen, hell, I’m going for it!’ ”
Tim’s approach may seem counterintuitive. Why spend even more time dwelling on the things we’re afraid of? The difference with his approach is that it was deliberate. Rather than simply allowing your mind to spiral into increasing levels of anxiety as you fret over any number of potential problems, the worst-case scenario approach goes beyond the worry to ask, “Is this worst-case scenario something I can live with?”
For example, a typical pivot financial fear might be, “I can’t afford to start a business. I’ll go broke.”
The worst-case scenario forces us to ask new questions.
What’s the most reasonable worst-case scenario?
Starting a business won’t kill you. But there may be some real costs.
What are the real costs of a pivot?
What will it really cost to start your business? If your pivot fails, what’s the real dollar cost? Can you quantify it?
Can I accept that cost?
If you can accept the reasonable worst-case scenario, what’s stopping you?
Fear never really goes away. I like to tell students that if you’re alive you feel fear—it’s a normal part of the human experience, and nowhere is it more likely to rear its head than in times of change.
Although we can’t eliminate fear, we can develop a practice to act in the face of it. When I first began to speak to large audiences, it was a daunting prospect, and I used the following practice to help:
1. Take a deep breath.
2. Get present with the fear. Notice it. Acknowledge that it’s normal. It doesn’t necessarily indicate danger or a threat. It’s simply a response to something new.
3. Become quiet. Continue to breathe deeply. This is essential. When we’re in a state of fear, our body is shifting into a fight-or-flight response, and our breathing shifts. You can help calm the response by breathing deeply.
4. Ask yourself: Am I experiencing excitement or fear? You might get onto a roller coaster, for example, and feel something like fear. But when you buckle up and go for it, you realize that it’s more excitement than fear.
5. Ask yourself: Will I let this stop me? Will I allow this normal feeling to stop me from moving forward and learning?
The magic of this process is that it turns a largely unconscious process—the fear response—into a conscious choice. When you begin to assess your choices in a conscious way, more often than not you will make leaps and bounds in your ability not to remove fear but to act in the face of it.
And every time you do act? You learn. You get feedback. You might be rejected by a love interest. You might fail at a business. You might be rejected by a man, a woman, a publisher, an investor, a prospect. But if you consciously acknowledge what you’re facing and acknowledge your own strength, you’ll be able to move forward.
I believe you’re built from stronger stuff than you realize. After all, you’re part of a lineage of people who survived. You’re built from the DNA of people who adapted and who acted in the face of fear. You come from a lineage of warriors. All you need to do is take the time to consciously tap into that legacy.
It may seem counterintuitive to move toward what you fear. But consider that doing just that is the exact process you went through in your young life. Before you were conditioned by school and work experiences to “not fail,” you failed almost constantly. Think of your first steps. You didn’t learn to walk by going to a weekend retreat to meditate on walking. Instead, you got up, fell down, got up, fell down. You failed over and over and over. But each time you stood a little longer, took an extra teetering step. With each failure you learned.
When you burned your hand on a hot pot, you didn’t cower in fear and give up eating. You learned to use a pot holder. You learned, and as a result you went forward.
Facing your fear—especially your fear of failure—is critical to pivoting. In fact, it’s so critical that, instead of being afraid to fail, your pivot may just require that you fail as fast as you can. Every failure means you learn. Every failure means you can stand up again and take a steadier, better, clearer step forward.
Though all pivot fears may seem different—the fear of public speaking is different from the fear of going bankrupt—there’s a deeper truth to the fear equation.
At the heart of all of our intangible pivot fears is one fear: that we won’t be good enough. People who fear change are people who fear themselves and are afraid to own their true power. They fear the unknown because they doubt themselves as being worthy of the challenge. If we take on the challenge of our pivot and fail, we’re afraid that we’ll have found indelible proof of our own inadequacy.
The reality is quite different. Each pivot step is like the deeper pools and higher heights of 27 Waterfalls. Even if you “fail” on one step and, like Kristina, come sputtering, panic-stricken, to the surface, that step has taught you something. Whether you see it or not, you’ve taken one more step, just like Kristina or Tim or thousands of others, toward feeling afraid but changing anyway.
That clarity—the fact that what you’re really afraid of is simply not being good enough—provides a new lens through which you can view your reinvention. It’s not the pivot that’s scaring you—it’s what pivoting says about you that is.
When Kristina Paider turned on her heel—literally pivoted—and jumped off the waterfall that day in the Dominican Republic to beat her fear, she wasn’t being impulsive; she was tapping into a deep, powerful source of clarity and, as a result, pivot energy. It’s a source of power that’s at work in all our lives, and one that we, like Kristina, can tap not only to overcome fear but to do things we never thought possible.
What spurred Kristina to jump off the waterfall that day was a decision about what kind of person she wasn’t. Was she the kind of person who would let fear dictate her life? Was she the kind of person who would live a life that was less than it could be? Was she the kind of person who was afraid she couldn’t? The answer, as she stared down from the cliff top that day, was no. And now she has the fear-free beach life of her dreams to prove it.
But it leaves us with another question on the pivot journey: If Kristina wasn’t the type of person who was afraid, what kind was she?
The answer to that question is the next stop on the path to clarity.