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7

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Get Caught Trying

Sometimes, the best way to become fearless is to walk straight into the fire of fear. I got my first taste of this on my final day of eighth grade, when I faced down that gang of vicious mean girls who wanted to kick my ass just for being brown, and again when I ignored the political elite who were telling me it wasn’t my turn and I should get to the back of the line. I walked into that fire when I tried yet again to get pregnant after three miscarriages, when I launched Girls Who Code even though I knew nothing about coding, and in hundreds of little ways every day since. Practicing bravery in the small ways in my day-to-day life has allowed me to step up and face my larger fears when it counted.

Braving my fear enables me to go after what I want and do what I think is right, even when everything isn’t perfectly aligned or guaranteed to work. As I said earlier, in the words of my mentor Hillary Clinton, I’d rather be caught trying than not at all. The strategies in this chapter will help you learn to get comfortable with your own imperfection—and yes, even failure—so you can stop being afraid of it. You’ve likely heard some version of the adage that bravery is not the absence of fear, but acting in the face of it. Because when you face your fear, you take away its power. That becomes your secret weapon that lets you escape the tyranny of perfection and go after what you really want.

Strategy: Ask for Feedback

For perfection-seeking girls and women, critical feedback is a bitch. If someone gives us anything less than a glowing review, we wither inside and immediately spiral into “I suck.” We take it as a permanent indictment of our character. It’s sickening, demoralizing, and altogether brutal.

The antidote to this is not to avoid criticism, but to actually invite it. Yes, you read that right: I want you to actively ask for cold, hard, unadulterated feedback. And not when you know you’ve aced something, but when you know you’ve got plenty of room for improvement. It’s kind of like radical exposure therapy to desensitize yourself. It might feel like a swift kick in the gut for an instant, but the more you do it, I promise, you’re going to discover really fast that critical feedback doesn’t hurt nearly as much as you think it will. Eventually it becomes kind of like a positive addiction: I now actually love getting it because it points me to my next challenge.

Recently I spoke at a rally right after the woman to whom I lost my public advocate race, who happens to be an amazing speaker and knows how to fire up a crowd. It was pouring out, my son had been pulling on my coat to get my attention all day, and I was especially run-down from traveling; to be honest, I’d been doing so much public speaking that I hadn’t really given much thought to what I was going to say. I figured, It’ll be fine. I’ve got this. After I spoke, I got into the car with my husband and asked him how I did. He looked at me and said, “You kind of sucked.” Um, what?

“You were a two, maybe a three, out of ten,” he said (as you can tell, we don’t pull any punches in our relationship).

The tough love admittedly didn’t feel great in that second—especially since it was an already serious sore spot to face the woman I’d lost my election to. Still, I was really grateful for his honesty. What good would it do me for him to sugarcoat and tell me I was great when I wasn’t? For a few weeks after that, I thought long and hard about how I’d gotten into my comfort zone with public speaking and how I could get better in rally formats. I’ve now gotten excited about recognizing that even if I’m at the height of my game, I can (and should) still find ways to improve.

The key to this strategy is to not just endure feedback, but to actively seek it out all the time, everywhere, from everyone—especially when you don’t want to hear it. I gave a speech recently in front of four thousand people and got a standing ovation. I was feeling really good about it and didn’t really want anything to spoil that, but I still asked my staff to critique me. Why? Because even the best speeches can always be better. I even do this in my personal life; after my husband and I have an argument and the dust settles, I ask him how I could have communicated better.

Angela Duckworth, author of the bestselling book Grit, identified the courage to accept feedback as one of the four critical factors for building grit. Those who have grit are constantly looking to improve, so they ask, “How did I do?” Angela points to great athletes as examples. Think about someone like Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps; how did they get that good? First, they focused narrowly on the one thing they wanted to improve on. Then they practiced…and practiced…with 100 percent focus. But the other key component is that they solicited feedback. They had the courage to face the fact that they weren’t perfect—to ask how and where they weren’t great—so they could refine and get better. They were living at the cutting edge of their ability and were totally turned on by that.

When you’re pushing yourself beyond where you’re comfortable and striving for improvement, you’re firing on all cylinders. That’s when you enter that magical psychological state known as “flow.” One secret to getting to that blissful state is to build up the courage to hear feedback, which points you to the next area of improvement, and the next, and the next. The more you do this, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll go from feeling kicked in the gut by criticism to feeling grateful and empowered by it.

Inviting criticism enables you to bear witness to your own imperfections and build a tolerance for them. First tolerance, then acceptance, and then, believe it or not, joy.

Strategy: Surround Yourself with Rejection

Boys and men aren’t tyrannized by failure. Because they’ve been trained from a young age to shake it off and just keep going (a fall off the monkey bars, a science experiment that bombs, a date invitation that gets turned down…), mistakes and rejection tend to roll off them in a way that most women can only envy. Our perfect-girl training has kept us safely isolated from the sting of rejection and failure, but as you know, it also weakened our resilience in our adult life. One way we build back our resilience and take the sting out of rejection and failure is by normalizing it.

When Shaan was a baby, our pediatrician told us to skip the excessive use of hand sanitizer and expose him to as many germs as possible to build up his immunity. Much in the same way, we can all immunize ourselves against rejection by exposing ourselves to it. In other words, don’t hide from rejection—own it!

Right now on my fridge I still have the original rejection letter from Yale Law School taped up right next to the rejection letter from my community board. Throwing them away gave them too much power over me. Staring them down, however, put me back into the driver’s seat. They remind me every day to be brave and keep going.

The more I exposed myself to rejection, the less it terrorized me. I won’t lie: there’s always been a little undercurrent of a living-well-is-the-best-revenge fantasy there; I dreamed one day of showing these people what I could accomplish, which gave my motivation a little extra edge.

Display your rejections proudly; they’re a mark of your bravery. Talk about your rejections, mistakes, and flubs, and invite your friends and colleagues to do the same. Read as many stories as you can about famous and accomplished people who lived through failures, like Stephenie Meyer, whose manuscript for Twilight was rejected by twenty publishers before it found a home, or Steve Jobs, who was long ago fired from Apple. Their setbacks didn’t destroy them, and neither will yours. In fact, they’ll set you free.

Strategy: Get Your Fear Signals Straight

The funny thing about feeling fear is that 99 percent of the time, it’s a false alarm. Our nervous system was designed to keep us safe from predators, so anytime we feel afraid, our primitive brain believes we’re about to be attacked and sends the signal to run like hell.

The problem, of course, is that your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between perceived danger and real danger. Your heart may be hammering and your palms might get sweaty—clear signals from your body that you’re in jeopardy—but realistically, standing up to your boss literally will not kill you. The doomsday we fear almost never happens. Your friend isn’t likely to disown you forever if you forgot to call when her mom came home from the hospital. You probably won’t lose your job if you show up late for a meeting. There’s a slim chance your kid’s future will be irrevocably destroyed if you accidentally send a snarky email about your kid’s teacher to her, instead of sending it to your husband (yes, I did that, and no, Shaan didn’t get blackballed).

When we’re driven to be perfect, any small flaw or mistake will trigger the alarm and send us running. What we want to do is train ourselves to recognize that, most of the time, we should ignore the alarm because it’s not a signal of genuine danger. It’s not a tiger that’s chasing you—it’s your modern-day anxiety.

I love this advice Dr. Meredith Grossman gives her patients: Do the opposite of what your anxiety is telling you to do. Your anxiety will always scream at you to run, hide, bail. So don’t! If it’s telling you to skip that networking event because you’ll feel too awkward, go. If it’s urging you to spend hours scrubbing down your apartment before your mother-in-law comes over, do a light cleanup and leave it at that. If it’s telling you to avoid making a public gaffe at all costs, type gibberish on your Facebook page and post it. It’s so liberating to see that, honestly, no one cares. And if they do, really, does it even matter?

Look for whatever makes you feel uncomfortable and go there. Show up ten minutes late without apologizing profusely. Send an inconsequential email with a grammatical mistake in it. Wear a shirt with a stain on it. Leave the house not looking your best. Wear a skirt without shaving your legs that morning. Tell a friend that you’re feeling insecure. Practicing imperfection doesn’t have to be superhard or grandiose. You don’t have to tell your boss to fuck off or become a hot mess in public. Do this in small, low-stakes ways so you can see that you can tolerate the stress. All the microactions we take to prove that our anxiety isn’t a reliable narrator add up. This paves the way for bigger and more tolerance of imperfection and, in turn, opens the door for bravery.

Strategy: Start Before You’re Ready

Here’s what generally runs through our minds when we have a big idea:

Oh, wow…that could be great.

I should do this.

I’m definitely going to do this!

Wait, but how about…?

I don’t know how to….

I can’t do…

This is probably a dumb idea.

Almost as soon as a brilliant idea arises, that annoying voice in your head starts yapping about all the reasons you shouldn’t do it, what could go wrong, how you can fail, how arrogant you’ll seem for trying, and how stupid you will look when you fall on your face. By the time you’re done listening, you’ve talked yourself right out of trying.

The trick to shutting up that annoying voice is to just start.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know absolutely everything you need to know right now to do a job—whether it’s running a company or becoming a mom. Most people don’t. Honestly, I’m not kidding. They pick it up as they go along. Don’t know how to change a diaper? You’ll learn. Not sure how you’ll manage thirty employees? You’ll figure it out. You always do, don’t you?

By all measures, I never should have started Girls Who Code. Remember, I had no idea how to code, I had never worked in the technology industry, and I had never started a nonprofit. But I couldn’t get the image of all those missing female faces in the tech classes I’d visited on the campaign trail out of my head. So I made a few phone calls to solicit some advice from a few people I trust. Then a few more, and a few more. I spent a year meeting with anyone and everyone I could to learn about the tech industry and about teaching girls. Today, Girls Who Code is a global organization that has taught more than ninety thousand girls that they have what it takes to pursue a career in technology, but don’t kid yourself that its founder knew what she was doing when she first started.

Cecile Richards, the formidable former president of Planned Parenthood, almost didn’t apply for the position. She said her self-doubt kept reminding her how she’d never done anything that big before, and she had a long list of all the things she didn’t know how to do. But, as she said, “I went ahead and tried it anyway. If you wait until everything lines up, it’s over.” Next time you have that idea or project, instead of talking yourself out of it or putting it off for “someday,” just start the process in some small way: make a phone call, buy the URL, write the first paragraph, set up a meeting to talk to some people you trust to get their thoughts. You don’t have to tackle the whole thing all at once. Up until pretty recently, I used to be really afraid to ride my bike downhill. Every time I got to a big hill, I’d skip it, and then I’d feel bad. Then I checked myself and saw that my old perfection wiring was steering: if I was going to ride a bike, damn it, then I was going to do it perfectly! But really, why did I have to tackle the HUGE hill? Why couldn’t I just start with a small slope, master that, and then go from there?

No more waiting until you’re “ready.” As Cecile Richards said, if you’re waiting for the stars to all perfectly align, you’ll be waiting forever. You’ll never have the exact right résumé, experience, child-care arrangement, or wardrobe. There is no ideal moment to begin any more than there’s the perfect version of you.

Just tackle the small hill first to get the energy moving in the right direction and see where it goes. The worst that can happen is that you fall. But so what? If you don’t take those first steps, you’ll always wonder what you missed out on. Far better to fall down trying than to never have tried at all.

Strategy: Choose Failure

Yes, you read that right. I want you to choose failure—or at least the potential for it.

In the start-up world, you’re not taken seriously if you haven’t had at least one colossal failure. The unofficial motto in Silicon Valley is “Fail early and often.” Almost no one gets it right the first, second, or even third time. Failure is baked into the innovation process; it’s how they learn what doesn’t work so they can home in on what does. This is why the business world worships serial failures like those of billionaire and Tesla founder Elon Musk, who was ousted as CEO of his own company, fired from PayPal while on his honeymoon, and had to cop to multiple critical malfunctions (and explosions) of his SpaceX rockets. Failure shows you’ve got what it takes to execute, pivot, crash and burn, and rebound.

Most of us are experts at weighing the pros and cons of an opportunity. A woman I know who works freelance spends days debating whether she should take on a project (driving most of her friends nuts in the process). When our careful analysis shows that we could fail, we don’t select that option; our perfection wiring urges us to look for a guarantee of success or forget it. Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from women who are thinking about running for office and looking for advice. I always tell them to go for it, even if—especially if—their chances of winning are slim, because it’s the value of the fight that matters.

Before she was a senator, Elizabeth Warren was a Harvard law professor and bankruptcy specialist turned activist. Beginning in 1995, she was involved in a monumental campaign to stop proposed legislation that intended to make it impossible for hardworking middle-class families in financial peril to file for bankruptcy. Despite her tremendous efforts in leading one of the biggest lobbies in history, they lost the decade-long battle when legislation was passed in 2005.

But, as Senator Warren has said, she’s not sorry she jumped into that fight. Now leading the charge in the fight to fix the health-care system in our country, she credits that early loss as an invaluable training ground. Through that experience she learned how to effectively battle for what she believes, made powerful allies, and hatched important new ideas—one of which eventually became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That failure helped her hone her voice and strengthen her bravery muscles—both of which I imagine came in pretty handy when she became a United States senator and famously stood up to the president.

So go ahead and do your risk calculus, same as you always do. Only next time, if it comes out seeming too high, do it anyway (as long, of course, as it’s not putting you or anyone else in serious jeopardy). I promise, failure won’t break you. Deep down, you know that. Here’s your chance to prove it to yourself.

Strategy: Do Something You Suck At

I can remember the first time I tried something that didn’t come easily to me. It was in sixth-grade gym class, and I attempted a cartwheel. All the other girls seemed to be able to easily launch their slender legs up in the air and execute a beautiful, graceful spin. But I wasn’t a skinny kid, and my one clumsy attempt looked more like I was playing leapfrog than doing a cartwheel. When I stood up, I saw my classmates cracking up and heard one of the popular girls sneer, “That was pathetic.” My cheeks burning with shame, I decided on the spot that that was my first and last cartwheel.

Even today, at age forty-two, I catch glimpses of that hot shame creeping in if I can’t do something gracefully—especially when I’m comparing myself to others who look like they can. Just this morning I went to spin class and noticed I wasn’t doing the moves as well as the woman on the bike next to me. Immediately I started judging myself, feeling bad, wanting to give up. But I didn’t, mostly because I’m committed to building my bravery muscle every chance I get (and a little bit because I’m committed to keeping my rear end north of my knees). When I’m feeling over my head—whether in a fitness class or speaking in front of some of the most brilliant minds in technology—I don’t fold. I don’t pull back or hide, even if I want to.

Doing something that you kind of suck at is yet another way to build a tolerance for imperfection and, in turn, revive the joy that perfection may have strangled. A woman I met named Eva told me that for years, she labeled herself a notoriously bad cook. Nearly everything she tried to make came out burned or tasted awful. Frustrated and defeated, she gave it up. That is, until she became a mom and her five-year-old daughter asked if they could make homemade brownies for the school bake sale. The brownies came out kind of mushy and undercooked, but it was well worth it to Eva for the memory she made with her daughter that day giggling and licking the batter off the mixer.

Fumbling your way through something new isn’t just about fun; it also changes your brain for the better. We can literally rewire our brains and what we’re capable of, which in turn expands what we believe we’re capable of. A famous study of London cabdrivers showed that learning the layout of twenty-five thousand city streets markedly increased the area of the brain that controlled their spatial memory. But you don’t need to take on such a huge learning curve to benefit; research has shown that gray matter increases after practicing a new undertaking only two times.

If you’re a lousy cook, make dinner (and I don’t mean by dialing for takeout). If you’re not the most coordinated person in the world, go to a CrossFit or dance class (see the next section, “Take on a Physical Challenge”). If you have two left thumbs, take a stab at painting or knitting. If you’re still carrying around the “I’m bad at math” block, learn to code (go to www.khanacademy.com). Trust me, nothing will teach you to tolerate mistakes faster than coding!

It’s probably time I give that whole cartwheel thing a try again.

Strategy: Take on a Physical Challenge

I was confused. Sitting with the seventh group of women I’d gathered together to talk about perfection and bravery, I found none of the things these women were saying jibed with all the other input I’d heard. When I brought up the topic of rejection, they said they were able to shrug it off by not taking it personally. Failure? Again, not a big deal for them; win some, lose some. Fear of taking risks? Not really, because the worst that can happen is you screw up and just try again.

Then it hit me. This particular group of women all worked in the fitness industry in one capacity or another, from trainer to fitness model to CEO of a national sports club chain and every single one of them had grown up as athletes. I asked about the impact of that and without hesitating, they all said playing a sport as a kid gave them a resilience they draw upon in their everyday adult life.

It turns out that empowering your body empowers your bravery. Sports have been shown to be an invaluable way for girls to build their self-esteem—and sidestep the perfect-girl wiring. On the field or court, there’s no room for being nice, polite, sweet, accommodating, neat, and clean. That’s where they get to be assertive, competitive, loud; where they get dirty, don’t have to hold back or apologize for their talent, and communicate directly and honestly in the interest of building a united team. It turns out that even mastering a physical activity is a huge bravery boost. This past summer, my fifteen-year-old niece Maya came to visit us and wanted us to take a surfing lesson together. I hate cold water (anything less than 85 degrees is cold to me), and did I mention I can’t swim? But because I hadn’t done anything outside my comfort zone in a long time, I said sure, let’s do it. I needed to shake things up.

I woke up that morning still pretty excited about doing something new and scary. When we got to the beach, I put on the wetsuit and felt kind of fierce. I loved the superchill energy of the surfer dudes, since I’m normally pretty uptight. We had a brief lesson on the beach and everything was going fine until I had to get in the water. Suddenly I got scared out of my mind and started asking John, my instructor, to tell me all the ways a person could die while surfing, which led to him eventually begging him to take me back to the beach. He was having none of it.

So I got myself into the water and paddled out a bit, finally. The next challenge was jumping up to get on my board, which meant falling into the water over and over. I was annoyed, frustrated, and drenched with saltwater up my nose and stinging my eyes…but I kept going. The waves kept crashing on me but I held on, and John kept telling me I was doing, “Awesome!” Trust me, I didn’t feel awesome. I really wanted to give up.

At one point, I looked to my left at my niece, who is an athlete, so of course she was a total natural at riding the waves. Then I looked to my right and saw—I kid you not—an eight-year-old doing a handstand on his board. I felt like an idiot shaking and swearing like a sailor, clutching my board for dear life. Come on, Reshma, I thought. This is ridiculous. You’ve tackled harder things than this! I’d come this far and wasn’t going to leave that ocean until I’d gotten up on that board one way or another.

When the next wave came, I hopped up on my two feet and stayed up for about ten seconds before I fell off. It was thrilling! I tried five more times, never staying up for more than ten seconds, but I didn’t care.

Would I do it again? For sure. I loved the challenge and the fact that it didn’t come easy for me. In fact, I want to go back and learn how to get past the fear barriers in my mind. It was an amazing experience, not because I managed to get up on that board (because I didn’t, really), but because I didn’t give up. I can’t remember a day where I felt so free and joyful.

You don’t have to try surfing to get this same boost—any physical act of bravery will get you there, as long as it’s something that’s both challenging and outside your comfort zone. Sign up for a 5K run, take a bike trip, hike a big mountain, chop wood, learn to ice-skate, try indoor rock climbing, take a Zumba class…whatever scares you most, that’s your ticket. Even if you spent your time as a kid reading instead of running, lack any semblance of hand-eye coordination (guilty on both counts), it’s not too late.

Trust me, if I can get myself on a surfboard, anything is possible.

Strategy: Use Your Hands

Anytime Shaan gets a new toy that has to be put together, my first instinct is to tell my husband to do it. Even if I open the box and start the process, almost immediately I get frustrated by how long it takes to figure it out. Hello, perfect-girl training…if I can’t get it right immediately, I’m outta there.

Same goes for Dimitra. She works in the tech industry, but if her laptop goes down, she immediately turns to her boyfriend for tech support instead of taking the steps to fix it herself. Kate, a wholly capable and competent single mom, told me she has a helpless meltdown anytime an appliance breaks in her apartment. “It’s like I turn into a 1950s housewife,” she said.

These kinds of tasks have become the territory of men partially because of old, outdated attitudes about what women can and should do, and partially because as women, we’ve never been taught to sit with the frustration and challenge that the majority of mechanical tasks require. After all, our society encourages boys to go for it and keep trying even if it’s complicated but lets girls off the hook, so we’ve never really been put into situations where we’re told to figure it out. This is the same phenomenon we see in our coding classes; when society is telling girls they aren’t good at something, there’s no motivation for them to stick with it and work through the problem. Later it colors everything from putting together an IKEA dresser to driving a stick-shift car. So ingrained is our aversion to frustration that not only do we believe we can’t do these things—we don’t want to try!

Don’t be a damsel in distress. Building or fixing something with your own two hands gives you power. Computer or phone freezes? Instead of immediately asking someone else to figure it out for you, call tech support and (calmly, with patience) go through the steps to fix the problem. Need to install your toddler’s new car seat but are confounded by the instructions? Find a YouTube tutorial and set up that sucker yourself (tip: you can find an instructional video on there for pretty much any task). Empower yourself with the basics to prevent yourself from slipping into old, helpless behaviors: make sure you’ve got the number for roadside assistance in your phone in case your car breaks down (no, your husband’s or dad’s phone number doesn’t count); take a walk around your house and check the batteries on the smoke detectors; gather up the instruction manuals for appliances and put them all in one place so you can find them when something goes on the fritz.

Learn how to check the air pressure in your tires (before you get a flat); check out a makerspace or sign up for a woodworking class; learn to operate a power drill and put up a shelf in your home; set up that coffee maker that’s been sitting in the box since you bought it.

If you get frustrated in the process, remind yourself that you’re not aiming to get the gold star here. It’s the doing that counts.