Mikey Likes It!
Do the thing your fear to do and keep on doing it…that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear. -Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), developer of famous courses in self improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills.
In the 1970s there was a great commercial for cereal that featured a couple of kids not so happy about trying this new cereal called Life…it was supposed to be good for you! After a quick team meeting they decided to delegate the task to a younger kid named Mikey because Mikey will try anything!Turns out, much to the shock of the two conspirators, Mikey actually likes it! The greatest part about Mikey is that he’s not afraid to take the risk and it turns out the result in this case is pretty good stuff! Well flash forward to the next millennium and I had the chance this weekend to watch a bunch of “Mikey’s” give it a try…happens to be that five of the Mikey’s belong to me! My three girls all had the opportunity to be involved in a singing pageant for the Holiday season. Now my kids have had some voice lessons but let’s just say we are a long way from winning American Idol…and that would go for the rest of the kids in the pageant as well. Yet I have to say, I was really impressed by these kids because they just went for it! Most of them were featured in either a solo or a duet so it was pretty hard to hide when they sang a bit off key or swallowed the words, but the best part was that not a single one of them quit…they played right through and gave it their absolute best! Forget about public speaking fears, how about public singing fears…if these kids were in a panicked state, you certainly could not see it!
The other scene takes place in a hockey rink where I have just introduced my twin 5 year old boys to hockey and I can tell you that there is nothing funnier than seeing them step on the ice for the first time…they looked like new born baby deer trying to find their legs…down they went! However, the natural inbred computer just kept telling them to “get up” and they did just that over and over again! As a matter of fact one of the first things they were taught was how to properly get up…there is an actual technique. You see the best part of these stories is what we can actually learn from watching children do what they do. I’m certainly not suggesting you throw caution and self preservation to the wind and start a wild physical experiment, I’m simply saying to consider how we forget to just give it a try…whatever “it” means to us. You see fear is a learned behavior and if you don’t believe me just become more aware of what parents are saying to their children at the local park or the grocery store or wherever else you can see them interact. It’s an incessant mental berating of the kid as the parent strives for that control position which can render life a little less chaotic and seemingly safe…but what is this really doing to us? Think about your own belief system and how that was affected by your parents’ beliefs or someone else of authority in your life. Did they effect the way you think about money? relationships? family? dreams? Maybe and hopefully so, a lot of it was positive, but what if they passed down their own fears?
The true thinking tool here was well described by Napoleon Hill in his seminal work Law of Success where he mentions “accurate thinking” as one of the laws! Think about that for a moment…what does it mean to have accurate thoughts? How about properly calculating risks? Is it really that risky to try singing or speaking in public? What’s the worst that can happen? The audience laughs or worse yet they throw rotten tomatoes at you? Who’s laughing anyway? Tell them to come on up and grab the microphone and give it a try…I bet they’d shrink down in their seats really quickly…you know why? Because they are more locked in fear than you will ever be and they feel better when you fail, it gives them a reason to never try! You see a real maestro would encourage you to continue on and never give up, because real achievers know how long it took them to get where they are…there is no such thing as an over night success when it comes to skill…it takes a lot of hard work; as a matter of fact Malcolm Gladwell’s research for his book Outliers says it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours to be the best! So remember to be like Mikey and give it a try…you just might like who you can really be!
Happy Holidays!
P.S. If you don’t know Mikey, have a look…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYEXzx-TINc
