The Climb: Overcome Fear and Take the Next Step

Yesterday I took my children to this fun play place where they have climbing walls and ropes and slides and all sorts of other ways to spend the day. We have a ton of fun and use up a lot of their overflowing energy, which helps them sleep really well at night. We're there at this play place and it's all renovated, and both kids are so excited. Everything's brand new. What they thought it was going to be was different.

They find this climbing section of the play place. The climbing section has five different climbing walls, as well as this set of stairs that are something like wooden pylons, obviously child-friendly version of wooden pylons, covered in some sort of a child-friendly material.

They have these 10 pylons that are ascending like a staircase and maybe two or three feet away. A kid that's maybe around 10 would have the right leg span, or gait in order to get all the way to the top. Once you're at the top, you're in your harness and you just get to enjoy this lovely free fall feeling of enjoying going from about 20 feet up in the air back down to the ground, so that you can repeat the whole process over again and enjoy this ascending staircase and then the freefall at the end.

My 10-year-old daughter, who's so brave in so many different ways, is attempting to do this pylon staircase over and over and over again. Every single time, she gets blocked at that ninth pylon. It was just the last pylon she could do.

She's big enough to go from one to the other. She did nine previous steps, but there was something, some fear, something blocking her from getting to that final step, from breaking through to that final hurdle, from breaking through that glass ceiling, where she could enjoy that full free fall from the top. Must have gone on like this 20 times. She's one, two, three, four. Still going. Five, six, seven, eight. Then nine.

Then I see her on the fifth or sixth time, I see her putting a foot up, okay, testing the waters. Then a couple more times, and I see her trying to sit on it. Okay, she's sitting on it. Yay, we're at the tenth, but we're kind of half invested in it. Then I see her put her feet back on nine and take the free fall from there. It went on like this for a few hours. We had a lot of fun.

It wasn't the only activity that they did at this play place, but she kept returning to it. She was stuck on it. She wanted to get there so badly. It was just blocked, just a mental block, some sort of a fear of getting to that top rung and having nothing on the other side to and keep going.

Had there been 10 more pylons after that 10th one, I am positive that she could have kept going. She would have gone to that 19th one and had that same feeling when she was about to go to that last pylon, of having nothing around it and the idea of putting two feet on a very small surface.

There's about 10 minutes to go. I collect the kids and say, "Okay, 10 minutes, everybody. Let's get in whatever you want to get in."

I see something click in her brain. I've just given her a deadline, a timeline, and she's like thinking about the staircase and how she wants to get to the 10th pylon. She says to me as somebody who documents every moment of her beautiful life, she says to me, okay, mom, get your phone. I'm ready. Record me. I see her go over there and she gets in the harness. She's ready.

She's thinking about it, takes a deep breath. Does her ritual, whatever that is. She goes for the first one and steps up to the second one and the third one. Slowly, deliberately, she does her thing. She gets to the ninth one. She does what she's done before, puts one step up.

I said, "Is she going to make it?"
Then I'm yelling, "Go girl! You got this thing."

And... she... did it!

She got the second foot up there, all the way up to that last pylon! I see this look on her face that's pure joy and pure excitement at what she just did. I see that she's so surprised that she did it. She knew she could do it. She had done nine before, but she did the last one that had been this block for her. She got over her fear when she had a little timeline.

A little enthusiasm behind it, a little challenge behind it, and she got over her fear. She's hanging out up there. Of course I captured it. She's so surprised. This is pure elation on her face. I see her take this amazing free fall and just enjoy herself on her descent back down to the bottom. Once she had done this, she decided to keep going. So if she had done this 20 times before and only gotten up to nine, now...

She went 20 times again and gotten up to 10. Up until now, there's a line of very cute little kids who are inspired by her, wanting to do the same activity and waiting for her to be done.

Made me think about creative projects:

1. How many times is it that you'll have all this time in the world, and you have such a meandering process to get a project done?
2. Then when you know you have only 10% time left, you're going to get it done. You're going to get everything you need to get done.
3. Sometimes it's even 90 % of that project getting done in that last 10 % of time.

I don't know why this is. Maybe it's fear, maybe it's mental block, maybe it's surmounting that last hurdle just like she was doing to get to that final step to break through.

Once you've done a project well and you've completed it, you know that you can take that next step. I think about it in my own running journeys. I've hit a lot of plateaus. I started running when I was young. I was on the track and field team. Now as an old lady, I think about some of those early on experiences of running because endurance has so much to do with your clarity, your confidence, your mental strength. I think even more so than your body, you just have to be able to plunge through it. I think about my high school coach and how did he work with this bunch of teenage kids that had so many different things going on and hormones and different levels of energy, how did he formulate us into a team?

It seemed to me that whenever I was super tired, whenever we hit any sort of a plateau was when he took out something like a tool to change it up, right? Like a suicide, which for anybody who doesn't run, it's not that morbid. It's just basically the hardest training tool that I ever had to do. Running, sprinting for your life halfway through a field and back, and then sprinting all the way across the field and back. They usually came in groups of 10.

By the time you're finished with the tenth one of going halfway through the field, all the way through and back as fast as you can, you're just ready to keel over and basically die, hence the name, suicides. But not that morbid. It builds you up and it gives you strength and it makes you better and faster. In high school I did hurdles and I did the high jump.

Man. Falling down on a hurdle or hitting your back and taking down the bar as you're descending in this free fall and you know you're going to hit the bar with your back on this high jump. I have so many fears from that and mental hurdles to getting to that 10th rung, getting to that 10th pylon.

In business, it's the same:
- How do we take it from 90% to 100% and beyond? How do we break through that glass ceiling?
- How do we see this bigger picture in which we can truly grow and do something that's unique and special in the marketplace?

For everybody, it's different. I do think that you need to have that light, that clarity, that confidence in your thoughts.

It's so important to believe in what you're doing because no matter whether you believe in it or you don't, you're right.

There's something about having that little timeline. Give yourself a timeline and see if that will give you the strength to know that you can do it.

You've already done this nine times. How do we get to the 10th?

Believe in it, do it. It's as simple as that.

Have a wonderful day!
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Stopping at the 9th level.

Stepping up for the first time.

That sweet smile of success!