When every piece of content isn’t a matter of life and death, you’re never short of content.
Through my work with one of my clients a few months ago, a thought emerged:
When every piece of content isn’t a matter of life and death, you’re never short of content.
At first, when I started writing, I didn’t know what I would write about.
So many things felt off-limits for all kinds of reasons, from ‘too scary to write about’ to ‘I’m not qualified to write about this’ to ‘I don’t know where to start’ to ‘I can’t write about this in 12 minutes’ to… so many other reasons.
But those weren’t the real reasons. They were stories.
The real reason was the fear behind the story.
The fear which I was facing into as I created this writing practice. A fear, underneath, that if I showed myself to the world more, bad things would happen.
I remember working with my coach on some of these fears, and other ones that showed up elsewhere in our work.
As so often happens, if you slow down with things that you’re resisting, and keep asking ‘And if that happens, then what?’ the risk becomes big quickly.
It becomes exitential.
If I write about this topic, people will laugh at me.
If people laugh at me, I’ll be humiliated.
If I’m humiliated, people won’t want to speak to me, or work with me.
If people don’t want to speak to me or work with me, I’ll be alone.
If I’m alone… well… I’ll die.
For the ancestors who lived in tribes, this would be true, of course. For me, less so.
I’ve seen this enough times with enough clients to know that - embarrassing as it feels to explose that kind of nested set of fears, I’m not alone in the way these things that we worry about have existential roots.
And so whilst it looks like so many good reasons for not writing, really I’m not writing about certain topics because it’s a matter of life and death.
And that makes a lot of sense - the stakes are high.
Except they aren’t.
That’s what I’ve found from seven years of this practice. As I wrote more and more articles, I gradually was able to embody the world’s counter-evidence to those fears. I haven’t been laughed at even (at least not very often, and mostly not to my face, physical or electronic). I haven’t felt humiliated (quite the opposite). I am not alone, and I haven’t died.
And now, things aren’t such a matter of life and death. And the number of topics that feel off-limits is tiny, and all of that through my own choice. Certainly, the thought with which I opened this article is true. I’m not short of content.
But these kinds of fears, leading to perceived existential risk, are not limited to writing.
The members of my community for coaches have heard me talk many times about the power of a challenge one of my coaches set me to invite people into coaching conversations. The value of that move was incredible.
And yet, it required enormous growth. I was reminded of this thought - about life and death and scarcity and abundance of options - when coaching a member of the community this week.
When each email sent isn’t a matter of life and death, then there is no shortage of people to email.
In one of my favourite scenes in the work of the novelist David Gemmell, the character Waylander is asked to explain how he is able to remain so cool and detached in combat.
To answer, he throws a pebble to the character, asking, Danyal. She catches it.
As the story continues, he asks her what she fears: losing him.
He says that if she doesn’t catch the next pebble, he will abandon her and her children in the middle of the warzone he found them in.
They both know this is a death sentence or worse.
And they both know that - hardened, scarred killer that he is - he’ll do it. The tension and pressure for Danyal is impossible.
He throws the pebble to her - a bad throw, low and to the side - but she is nimble, she reaches out and catches the pebble.
She leaps in celebration.
‘What did you just do?’ asks Waylander.
‘I won!’ she exlaims.
‘No, what did you just do?’
‘I conquered my fears!’
‘No.’
She doesn’t understand until, as he walks away, she sees it.
‘I caught a pebble in the moonlight.’
When writing an article or sending an email feels like life or death, everything is different.
Our minds and bodies are preparing us as though we were facing down killers in a warzone.
But we are writing an article.
We are sending an email.
We are catching pebbles in the moonlight.
—
PS To read a not-from-memory version of the story, visit my website dedicated to Gemmell’s work.
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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