Mailbag: How to get past fear

Q: I don't think I'm cut out for fundraising.  I love my organization and I want to help get the funds we need to survive and do our work...and I even know what I *should* be doing, I think.  But when it comes to picking up the phone and calling donors, I can't.  I am stupidly panicked and get anxious and just can't pick up the phone.  How do I get past my fear?  I don't want to keep letting people down.

A: I have a friend who posted a quote on her facebook wall recently, and I've been chewing on it such that it made me fish your email out of the ol' mailbag.  Here it is:

"Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.” --Steven Pressfield

I want to like this quote.  I really do.  But the more I think about it, it's hooey.  The only thing I actually agree with is that fear is good.

Fear is an alarm system for when you've got some instinct and insight cooking in your brain, but it hasn't figured out how to form comprehensible thoughts yet.  That means you should always pay attention to fear - it's an alert that you need to figure something out, that you need to examine why your emotions are aflame.  WHY are you afraid?

Mr. Pressfield would have you run full speed towards whatever makes you afraid.  And I think that popular sentiment, that fear is something you must conquer by force, is coloring your question.

Why are you afraid of calling your donors?

You must figure that out before truly addressing how to move forward, past your problem.  But maybe you're new to fundraising, and that makes it a little tricky to self-analyze...so here are some possible reasons that might be underneath your fear.  It's obviously far from a complete list of the possibilities!

1) You're afraid of rejection, in all its glorious forms.  The person on the other end of the line might yell at you for being a glorified telemarketer.  The person on the other end of the line might unload all their grievances about the organization in general, by the screaming bucketload.  The person on the other end might tell you they're offended that lowly you would dare to call high and mighty them.  The person on the other end might tell you that they're not interested in supporting your organization any more.  The person on the other end might tell you they know why you're calling, but they'll call you if they want to make a gift.  The person on the other end might rudely but simply say "oh, Susie from Org. X?  Not interested, thanks," and hang up.

Rejection isn't any fun.  But it's something you can and must live through as a fundraiser, without taking it personally.  Figure out how YOU can get your mojo back after a nasty rejection (I tend to use it as an excuse for a latte instead of the cheapest coffee I can find; remind me and I'll do a whole post on other ideas some day), and then force yourself to call.

2) You can't envision the conversation.  Do you know why you're calling this person, or did you read a bit of fundraising advice that says "call your biggest donors at least once every two months" or some such nonsense?  I say nonsense because it's not bad advice, it's just utterly useless without understanding WHY it's something you should be doing.  No one picks up the phone just to say hi anymore, not even with their closest friends.  Figure out why you're calling.  If you're still nervous after you decide that you're calling to update them on the success of your summer programs, or want to set up a time for them to come see the gardens their donations supported, or want to take them to lunch to talk about planned giving, or want to know if they would give some feedback on a mailing you're planning for next month, go ahead and script a few lines.  Really.  Write them down like you're writing a play.  The only caveat there is that you're not allowed to keep reading what you've written word for word if the conversation goes somewhere else.  You have to listen to the conversation that's actually happening once you get there...but scripting can tamp down some fear when you're afraid of not being prepared.

3) If planning out the conversation and accepting that rejection is not failure still leave you panicked, perhaps you don't know your donor well enough.  Some people deeply fear the unknown, and unknown donors are just so unpredictable that it's hard to use the above crutches to get through an encounter.  Plan a get to know you meeting.  Tell your donor that you want to make sure you really understand them, so that you can better serve both them and your organization.  Have a lunch or coffee date where you truly get to know them (as donors, please...keep it professional!)  Plan to ask them about their connection to your organization.  Their childhood.  Their philosophy about life.  THEN their philosophy about giving away money.  Their own fears (you can share yours - the fear of letting down your organization).  Their own dreams.  See if that level of humanizing and understanding puts your fears to rest (and greatly strengthens the donor's institutional connections, to boot.)

4) Is phone the right way to connect with this donor?  Maybe you're getting the wiggins from the telephone because this donor has never ever had a phone conversation with you.  You've put in your development plan that you're going to call 3 donors a week, but you didn't really think about the fact that the next 5 donors on your list are all senior executives in the prime of their career who have no interest in getting on the phone with you in the middle of their day.  But they'd love an email.  Or a random handwritten note with whatever you were planning on saying to them.  Here's a perfect example of why you don't simply run roughshod over your fears as if they were beacons shining on the best path forward.  Your instincts here are giving you valuable information about a better way forward.

For every set of fears, there's a different set of questions to ask yourself as you figure out what's sending up the bubbles of anxiety and apprehension.  When it's something that is internal - you are afraid of rejection or failure, and there's great risk of feeling those things if you press forward - sometimes you have to figure out how to simply get past that fear, conquer it and keep conquering it until exposure therapy tames that particular fear.  But when it's born of something that you should be fixing before moving forward, listen to that, too.  

Our own fear can give great advice.

 

For You: Tricks for improving your creativity

Ever feel burned out at work?  Perhaps it isn't bad enough that you'd call it burn out - you're on autopilot, or just simply uninspired.

Learning ways to hit the "reset" button on your creativity is a phenomenally useful trick.

Here are two exercises you can try immediately.

1. Take a walk.

It's not quite as simple as taking a walk.  You need to take a walk somewhere that isn't thoroughly familiar to you, so turn left where you usually turn right to get your coffee at that cute little shop and keep wandering.

When you're walking in unfamiliar terrain, your brain is forced out of autopilot into a state of higher vigilance.  You'll be less able to focus on doing other tasks while you're walking (I wasn't going to recommend you take work with you, beyond maybe a phone for conversational work calls - nothing that would require you take notes), but when you get back to your desk you will remain more alert for a while.  That means you'll be noticing more, and be primed to react more strongly.  It'll feel like instinct.

Bonus: recent studies suggest that walking 40 minutes, 3 times a week helps you retain connectivity as you age - which means better performance on cognitive tasks.

2. Spend 15 minutes each morning making a list.

Nope.  Not a To Do list.  Those are also great, but a subject for a different day.  You're going to set a timer and write a list that engages your creative self.  The time factor is important - it's really hard to remain at this task for 15 minutes, but the push past difficulty is part of what we're doing.  It's also very hard to make a list for that long without starting to think differently...we get the obvious out of the way, and we start to take joy in what we're noticing next, in our unique perspective and observations, perhaps in our clever vocabulary.

So what kind of lists are we talking about?  There aren't that many wrong answers, we're looking for categories that you can either observe or imagine in detail.  Lists like:

• Things I can see out my window
• Things that are in my refrigerator
• Accessories and what I wear them with
• How I describe my colleagues' haircuts
• What I remember about being 12
• Superpowers that I would give people I know
• What I smelled on my walk to work

It can be straightforward (looking out the window) or whimsical (superpowers) - don't spend too much time thinking about the category, work to make your list.  Make a list every day as part of your daily routine.  15 minutes, no cheating.

The lists will be useless after they're made.  Go ahead and throw them out.  You're not writing poetry.  But you are training yourself to be creative on demand, and like a muscle sculpted by lots of hard work, you'll get to flex and show off the next time you need to brainstorm or otherwise figure your way around an obstacle at work.

Oh, this?  These are my CREATIVITY guns.  I made them with my mind.

Fridays For You: SMART Goals

One thing that turns into great unhappiness is the sense that you are not achieving your goals, that you are not making headway, that you are not getting things done and you will never be a success.

Note that I said the sense that all this failure is happening...because we humans are very prone to a thing called confirmation bias.  We don't really see things so objectively; we give great weight to evidence that supports our theory and beliefs, and discount anything that might suggest we're wrong.  That means that when we're in a nice deep blue funk (for whatever reason, legitimate or not), we're going to see all the things that support our belief that we're a failure and gloss over our successes.

At the same time, if you're a woman (and actually, plenty of men fall into this category too - it's just statistically more likely to be a gender thing, thanks to a heap of social pressures and reinforcements), you are going to look at your professional accomplishments and misattribute them - to anything other than your work.  You will find reasons to not take credit for things that you have accomplished, even if they are things you actively worked to make happen.  

There's a powerful tool to combat both of these things.  SMART goals.

Goal setting is a great way to organize your daily work, manage your professional growth in monthly and quarterly and yearly chunks, and think about the longer horizon in a productive way.  But most people set goals like "get promoted by next year" or "get boss to like me" or "become a successful novelist"...even something as compelling but utterly unmeasurable like "be happy."

If you are setting unmeasurable, unrealistic goals, you will never achieve them (because they're unrealistic) and even if you did, by some miracle, get there, you'd never know (because they're unmeasurable!)

SMART goals are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Timely

An example of a specific goal - let's say you're hoping to go to law school - don't say "I want to improve my LSAT scores"...your specific goal will be "I want to increase my logic score to the 97th percentile."

The above is a good example of a measurable goal, too...but much of life doesn't result in concrete test scores.  Let's say that you've read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and are convinced that you don't speak up enough in department meetings.  Rather than "speak up more in meetings," your goal will be "speak up at least 2 times in every meeting."  It's more than your base level, and you can keep track in a very concrete way: simply count.

Achievable goals, well, you have to keep yourself honest on this one.  "Get promoted to Vice President" is achievable (even if it's not easy - that's why it's a goal, not a forgone conclusion) for some people, but let's assume you shouldn't put it on your list of goals for next year if this is your first year out of college, working for a Fortune 500 company.  Again - achievable is not meant to keep your goals from being ambitious, just realistic.  

I like checking things off my to-do list as much as the next person.  But "take shower" is not something that's super relevant to my larger goals - specific, achievable, measurable, yes, but completely tangential at best to my three year plan for world domination.

Timely is one of the things that I find oddly hard for my more ambitious clients.  They want to beat the curve, they want to do the superhuman.  I force them to adhere to the achievable guidelines - ambitious is OK; virtually impossible is not productive.  For example, a junior professor I worked with insisted that 3 publications and 2 new grants was a good goal for the fall semester.  Nope.  We sat down and looked at a timeline to tenure and came up with a much more plausible set of goals...timing is often the key on making a goal achievable or not, and don't forget that all your goals add up, so accomplishing one or two may be possible, but not if you have six labor intensive goals that you expect to accomplish all at once.

There are plenty of resources on the web when it comes to SMART goals.  They're used in both teaching and business management a lot.  Give them a whirl.

I want to be explicit about what they'll do for you though:

• If you're prone to confirmation bias, SMART goals, thanks to their measurability and relevance will keep you from giving too much weight to your negative thoughts.  It's hard to wallow in an I'm-Such-A-Failure Funk when you have some very concrete evidence that you're making small gains on a consistent path to a bigger goal.
• If you're prone to impostor syndrome, it's hard to change your perspective, but SMART goals are again, concrete evidence that you are setting goals and realizing them.  Luck and the efforts of other people are part of the mix, but you deserve credit for these specific, measured achievements that you conceived, committed to, and made happen.
• Also, duh - they're a good tool for thinking about where you're going and how you're going to get there.  Goals are also good for keeping you focused and moving forward towards whatever those goals might be.

Want help figuring out how SMART goals apply to your life?  I'm willing to workshop with you in the comments section.  

Announcing a New Feature: Fridays For You!

I thought about calling this Fundraising Free Fridays, because that's what this is...but one of the things I'm always saying is that everything relates to fundraising, one way or another...so, dear reader, I didn't want you to think you were completely off the hook.

But here's the thing - The Development Shrink as a blog is becoming my professional soapbox, and it needs to expand, since I have not one but two areas of passion in my coaching practice.  The first, which you've clearly seen in this blog thus far, is development as a synonym (euphemism?) for the full work of fundraising.  But the other is for personal development, helping individuals advance their own leadership skills - something that runs the gamut from working with college students and millennials just starting to manage their own careers to working with senior executives on refining management techniques and working around/through their weaknesses in the workplace.  I particularly love working with women and minorities, since I have found that many of the most popular trade books on leadership do not address the particular challenges and penalties faced by everyone who is not an older white man, and I most often work with folks who are working somewhere in the nonprofit sector (including folks in higher education - that counts as mission-driven!).  

So...

Starting today, I'm going to start injecting a little personal development into this development blog.  Fridays from now on will feature a leadership tip or exercise.  I hope you like it - and please, please, share with your friends and colleagues.

Fridays For You: a trick for stressful situations

About to go into a stressful or high pressure situation?  (A negotiation, a public speaking engagement, a job interview?)

Squeeze your LEFT fist as hard as you can for 30 seconds, then let go.  (Make sure you're getting to a full 30 seconds - that's a longer time than you think it is, when you're focused on something like this.  If you can't see a clock with a second hand from wherever you are, count Mississippi.  Remember to breathe.)

Unlikely though it may be, this trick dramatically improves the performance of athletes performing tasks for which they have trained...and you've trained for your job, too!  Published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology as a study on preventing people from "choking under pressure," this technique is called "hemisphere-specific priming," and there's a growing body of research that shows that enhanced right-hemisphere activity (what you're forcing when you squeeze your left fist) facilitates skilled performance.

This is no substitute for preparing properly for one of those high stress situations...do your due diligence!  But this tiny trick won't hurt, and could give you that slight edge that you need in a high stress situation.

Try it - let me know if it works for you!