Choose Courage, Get Uncomfortable

“Turtles are slow.”

I was staring at the sentence in fear.  I tried to read it out loud but just couldn’t get the first word out.  Sweat started forming on my forehead and I started to panic.

“Just start reading the first few lines…  Do the best you can” said the voice from the speech therapist on the other side of the wall.

“T-t-t-t…  “

Stuttering is a mysterious affliction.  Science is still trying to figure it out.  There are practically as many unknowns as knowns and for most stutterers there’s no real cure.

I was unfortunately afflicted with a horrible stutter from an early age.  Even my earliest childhood memories, back when I was so young that my vocabulary consisted of monosyllabic words, I remember that I stuttered.  Kids learn by mimicking, and I was self-aware enough to realize that in language I was not mimicking correctly.  Something was wrong.

By the time I got to be 7 or 8, that age when kids learn the art of cruelty, I was easy pickings.  The laughter and teasing that my stutter provoked resulted in withdrawal, and a complete loss of self-confidence.

In an age when bullying was just an accepted reality instead of a national crisis, I was the pinata.  My stutter only seemed to get worse.

Despite it all I survived and managed to get by.  I became really adept at vocabulary actually, particularly synonyms.  Since most stutterers get hung up on certain phonetic sounds, they learn to replace troublesome words with synonyms or restructure sentences to make them easier to say.

I struggled with words that started with hard consonants, like “turtle”.  So I kept a quiver of alternate words in my stash that I had an easier time saying.  In a weird way, stuttering can be good for education…

 

Sheer Terror

Public speaking is one of the biggest fears in society in general.  Most people would rather extinguish a cigarette on their eyelid than have to speak in public.  Given that, it’s hard to explain the level of terror associated with having to speak in front of people when you stutter.  Terror only begins to describe it.

When I had to do a presentation in high school for a class, which was not all that uncommon, there was suddenly a doomsday marker on the calendar.  A day for the Grim Reaper.  The worst possible thing ever.

I’m going to stand up there and stutter all over the place and they’re going to laugh at me.

Life over.

The fear was so bad that, given the choice between having to give a presentation to my classmates or just having a bunch of guys hold me against the wall and continue kicking my boy-parts, I would have easily chosen the latter.  No question.

I continued in this existence through high school and college.  My stutter actually got a little better in college, but was still solidly there.  My fear of speaking in front of people was as strong as ever.  It was just my reality and I had to cope.

 

Teach A Man To Fish

Fast forward a few years and I’m in the working world at a job that I hated.  Mostly I hated my boss and he wasn’t going anywhere, so I had to.  The agency I worked for was large and had it’s own training department or “school house” as they called it.

One day I saw a job opening for an instructor at our school house.  Things had gotten so bad with my boss that I was desperate to leave.  I don’t know what got into me that day, or who spiked my ginger ale, but I applied.

I got an interview.  No big deal, I was able to handle interviews with 2 or 3 people much better than speaking in front of many, but it was still entirely nerve wracking.  It went really well.  I remember walking to my car thinking…. “What if they offer the job?  No way I’m taking it!  What am I doing here – teaching!?  Am I crazy!!?”

A couple days later they offered me the job.

I can’t say what was driving my decisions at that point, but some internal voice was speaking to me, and I knew I had to listen.  I knew I had to face the fear, that life couldn’t go on the same way.  If I wanted to grow and be happier I had to get out of my comfort zone – waaaay, way out of my comfort zone and face a primal fear.

The voice was telling me that my stutter would only be conquered by a full frontal attack, guns-a-blazing.  Making that attack was going to require courage, and being very uncomfortable. 

The whole sequence of events, from applying to a teaching job and interviewing, I almost felt like my behavior and decisions were being controlled by someone else.  Like I was a puppet being controlled by a necessary fate.

So I took the job.  The apparent insanity of what I had done quickly turned into a date with a lecture and 20 students.  I was scheduled to start teaching in a month, after I learned the curriculum!  I studied and prepared and in the end, doomsday came.

And from that day on, doomsday started losing.

Sure I had some trip-ups, and yeah I was still beyond nervous.  But with each lecture and lesson taught, I got stronger and stronger.  And, right along with it, my stutter got weaker and weaker.

I did that job for 4 years.  Most days I stood in front of 20 to 25 students, teaching 3 – 5 hours of lecture, then assisting with computer exercises.  Within a year, it became routine.  I actually loved it, and thrived on it.  Not long after, I applied to a second job at a large university as an adjunct instructor and still hold that job today, 16 years later.

I’m a teacher, something that I could never have fathomed when I was being bullied as a stuttering 7 year old.

It happened because I got out of my comfort zone.  Way out.  I did something that utterly terrified me, and in the end it benefited me beyond any and all expectations.

 

Optimal Anxiety

We all have comfort zones.  Most of us spend a majority of our existence in them, we’re programmed to do just that.  Comfort zones aren’t inherently bad, but they are limiting.  They cultivate complacency, stagnation.  They don’t force us to adapt and overcome.

Forced stress and risk are good things.  Research dating back over a hundred years calls this “optimal anxiety”.  There’s a reason millions of people run marathons and climb dangerous mountains.  Or take on difficult degree programs and massive, seemingly impossible tasks.

Ever heard of the Barkley Marathons?  It’s arguably the hardest running race in the world.  It’s a 120 mile race through the mountains of Tennessee, mostly with no trail.  Bushwacking.  Navigate on your own.  It’s so hard that of the hundreds of people who have tried over 31 years, including elite professional ultramarathoners, only 15 have ever even finished the race.

Forget winning, most years no one even finishes.  I highly recommend the documentary by the way.

Who would enter such an insane race?  Year after year, the preponderance of entrants have advanced degrees and are hugely successful in life.  The first guy to finish twice, Brett Maune, is a PhD in physics and did his thesis on “Fluidic and polymeric integration and functionalization of optical microresonators.”

Folks like him got to be that successful in life because they take on challenges like the Barkley marathons!  Wired did a great article on why scientists tend to do torturous physical events and interviewed Maune.

From the article:

Maune sees a connection between academic degree and the degree of athletic difficulty someone is willing to endure. “It takes a lot of effort, a lot of focus, and there’s a lot of pain and suffering that goes on in a PhD,” he says. “If you make it through the process, for better or worse, it’s a signal that you can have a long-term focus on a problem and see it through to the end.”  

The article goes on to say that 55 percent of triathletes make more than $100,000.  And almost 90 percent of triathletes have attended college or more, compared to 30 percent of the general population.

Triathlons = suffering.  And suffering = more success.  Suffering is a catalyst for success.

 

Get Uncomfortable

I’m not advising that you design your life so you’re suffering all the time.  And I’m well aware that so many live in a state of suffering that’s not of their own choice.  My stuttering problem was not my choice either.

But how can you get out of your comfort zone to help your journey to financial independence?  Or to simply grow as a person?

Maybe it’s taking on that new project at work that you’re not sure you can handle, or becoming a manager even though you don’t think you can do it.  Or maybe it’s starting that passion project that you know will be a huge time suck, but that could possibly pay off big time.

I decided to face my stuttering head on.  I couldn’t let the fear and terror of speaking rule me anymore.  It would have defined my life if I let it.

So I didn’t let it.

I’m fortunate that I was able to conquer one of the major hurdles presented to me in life.  I realize everyone won’t be able to do the same.  But the hope of changing a bad situation in life comes pre-packaged with the reality that it will be uncomfortable.

What fears do you have?  What’s holding you back?  What do you want to conquer in life?  How great would it be to beat that thing?  To do it, you’re going to have to get uncomfortable.

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