In regard to being a parent, my husband and I joke with each other that we are off to the “work spa” when one of us heads up to the office. Work feels easy and relaxing compared to dealing with the constant demands of feeding, clothing, and entertaining a young child – not to mention keeping them from serious bodily harm. With regard the latter I am almost daily surprised to discover new ways that our son could potentially poke an eye out, knock his teeth out, get a concussion, or otherwise kill or permanently maim himself. I live in a state of constant low-level anxiety because I am now aware that there are probably ten times as many ways for him to get injured as I can think of on my own.

While our business is “older” than our child, I can remember the same feelings of exhaustion when it was first “born” as it took my constant energy and attention in order to keep it alive. I know from seeing parents of older children that, as our son gets older, he will not need the constant attention that he does now to keep him safe. He will develop an ability to fend for himself somewhat and survive in the world on his own without our constant care and attention.

It is the same with a business. Each year, as long as we are doing our job as entrepreneurs correctly, our business will also need just a little bit less from us. The same will be true for our son if we do our job as parents correctly. As entrepreneurs our job is to balance our time working ON our business (building systems that run whether we are there or not) with time spent working IN our business (doing whatever needs to be done in the moment) so that, ultimately, our business is able to function independently of us.

Being a parent is similar. In order for our child to grow up healthy and strong, we need to help him learn how to do for himself, rather than doing everything for him. It is actually easier to see the error of my ways in my business when I think of it in terms of parenting. If I am too attached to me being the only one who can do it right, then I am actually crippling my company from building the strength to fly on its own – not to mention clipping my own wings by keeping myself tied to tasks that may not be putting my talents to their highest and best use. If I don’t let my son feed himself because he makes more of a mess than when I feed him, I am both hampering his ability to develop competence and confidence in mastering this skill, and contributing to my own exhaustion by creating a situation where I need to be sitting there feeding him instead of being able to feed myself instead.

So as we are finally feeling the slight easing up of the pressure of this constant demand on our mental, physical, and emotional energies, I find myself wondering if I am ready to go back down into the abyss again – knowing that this time it might possibly be even more difficult as I will have a 2 -3 year old as well as a newborn to contend with. Furthermore, while our business is growing nicely, like any other nine-year-old, it still needs daily attention from us in order to  thrive.

The optimistic part of me wants to believe that it will be easier because now we know what to expect. In my younger days my natural optimism would win out and I would be going full speed ahead on baby number two telling myself that it would definitely be easier the second time around, that our business is no longer a “newborn” and is certainly on more stable footing than it was even 2 years ago, and that everything is going to work out for the best. Life has taught me that my natural optimism is not always warranted. Certainly it might be easier the second time around, but it might also be harder. Our son was actually a pretty easygoing baby, so number two could very well be demanding, high-strung, or any other number of things that would bring new challenges to those first few years and make them even more exhausting. Any number of things could happen with our business – such as the coming rollout of the HST -  to necessitate changes that would require more of our time and energy.

How do I reconcile my natural optimism – my spiritual faith that everything happens for a reason and always works out for the best – with my real world, school of hard knocks, life experience that life and business can get pretty hard at times, no matter how much faith you have? How do I get excited about the silver lining, when I am now acutely aware that the cloud comes with it?

….6 months later

Our son is now two and, while the reality of the issues identified above remain the same, there is now a lightness around the issue that wasn’t there before. Like in so many areas of our lives where we are struggling to determine the right choice, if we stop struggling and let the simple force of time work it’s magic, clarity emerges. At about 21 months, I was on a retreat with my writers group and one of the members was telling her story of  how she had arrived when her mother was 43. By the time my friend was 34, her mother had passed away. As I am 43, in that instant, all of the worries about the challenges of having a second child disappeared. It became clear to me that my purpose in having a second child – whether by natural birth or possibly adoption – was not to fulfill my own potentially misguided vision of the “perfect” family, but to give my son the opportunity to have the connection and support of a family once my husband and I are gone. This clarity of purpose – a deeply felt connection to why this piece of our vision is important – has simultaneously brought greater commitment to act in pursuit of our goal and greater acceptance that the achievement of this goal may not be totally within our control.

Not surprisingly, work has been mirroring life. The last three months have also brought considerable clarity around the why and how of our business. This has also brought renewed enthusiasm for action, greater peace with the process, and less attachment to the outcomes.

I hope I can remember all this the next time I am tied in knots, efforting to determine the “right” choice….

But aren’t I supposed to be the one setting the perfect example of how to do it right – all the time? Aren’t I supposed to walk my talk every moment of every day?

That’s what I used to think. That is the “lie” that I still uncover at the source of my exhaustion when I catch myself yet again trying to be perfect – to hold myself to a standard higher than is humanly possible. It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that this is actually what makes me good at what I do as a coach, trainer and consultant. The books I have read, the courses I have taken, and the experience on my resumé have certainly contributed to my expertise, but the real learning has come from my own struggles to apply this “book learning” into the real world – starting with my own.

The truth that I can see in my moments of sanity is that, just as a child learns to walk or talk by getting it wrong in a thousand different ways before they finally get it right, I cannot learn to “walk my talk” without giving myself permission to fail at it – repeatedly. I watched my son struggle single-mindedly for months, falling incessantly and getting more than a few bumps before learning to walk at 10 months. Now at 17 months, each day brings new excitement as we try to figure out which words the sounds he is experimenting with are intended to be. His insistent whining demonstrates his frustration that we don’t always understand him, but this doesn’t stop him from continuing to try. On the contrary, it only seems to increase his resolve to communicate.

It makes me wonder at what point we lose the innate sense of capability and potential we are born with as children and become the “grown ups” who see failure, mistakes, and not getting it right the first time as valid reasons to stop trying.

Talking with my coach last night I recognized that, up until about 10 years ago, my child-like naiveté that I could do anything I wanted if I just kept trying was relatively intact. Then, in the first three years after returning home from living in Japan, I experienced a fall from grace. I met with financial hardship, loneliness, and, after investing a huge amount of time, energy and passion in a business partnership with a close friend, the devastating pain of betrayal and the end of that relationship. It wasn’t until last night that I realized how profoundly I had allowed this experience to change me. Despite my deep passion and need for collaboration and partnership, since that failed partnership experience I have shied away from allowing myself this experience in a deep way on either a business or personal level even with my husband.

As this realization sinks in, I find myself asking, “What would my son do?” He has just learned to climb up on the kitchen chairs by himself. Yesterday I saw him looking at the table, strategizing how to get on top of that as well. I fear that it is only a matter of time before he takes advantage of a moment when my back is turned to make his move. What if he gets up there and falls? Surely it will be painful, but will it stop him from trying again? Experience tells me that it won’t. Just six weeks ago he figured out how to climb out of his crib and was rewarded with a substantial bump on the head. Of course we lowered his crib so that he has not yet been able to duplicate the feat, but I regularly catch him trying to get his leg up over the bars to repeat his accomplishment.

As we get older and master more skills, it only makes sense that we will take on bigger and bigger challenges. Like my son, the higher we attempt to climb the greater the pain if we fall. For many, like myself, the memory of a really painful fall makes us shy away from the edge – but at what cost? Last night I began to get a glimmer of the true cost of my choice to “play it safe”  after my own painful falls on my journey to climb to higher levels. It has impacted my energy, my authenticity, my self-expression, my integrity, my financial stability, my relationships and even my health. The person I was before “the fall” ran her life on the belief that fear and passion were two sides of the same coin and that in going in the direction of my greatest fear, I would find opportunities to express my passions in the most fulfilling and lucrative ways. The results in my life and, more importantly, my joy in the process of getting there, validated this belief. The person after “the fall”, runs around wasting tons of mental, emotional, spiritual and physical energy trying to figure out how to make sure she won’t fall before she will even attempt to climb again. As I write this I recognize that, rather than ensuring success when I do make my next attempt, I am defeating myself before I start precisely because I am not starting at all!

So as I look back at those pesky new years resolutions I can see that I have not been giving them my full effort. I have not really committed to them for fear of failure. But I have a choice to change that. I can and I am giving myself permission to keep failing and to be just as “naively” excited about trying the next time as I was the first. I am going to practice being more child-like – more attached to the excitement and sense of possibility of mastering a new skill than I am to the discomfort of failing, however many times and however painfully I need to fail to get there. Rather than allowing my fear of failure to prevent me from trying again, I am going to accept that failure is part of learning. Like my son analyzes the results of each failed attempt at vocalizing a word, adjusts it slightly, and fails better the next time, I am going to stop expecting myself to succeed at each successive attempt and instead only ask that I “fail better” than I did the last time – that I learn something that moves me forward.

I will keep you posted on my journey of “failing better” and staying excited about it and would love to hear about all of your amazing failures as you work towards making the shifts you desire in your life and work for 2010.

Watch: The Story of Stuff

Beyond debit, extrapolating the faux security of credit, it’s not hard to see how quickly things can get out of hand.

Perhaps you’ve played with different levels of budgeting with varying degrees of success. But unless you’re hyper-disciplined it can be difficult to maintain the fortitude to persist. Over at getrichslowly.org there’s an interesting blog on using a Per-Diem system to achieve a tangible sort’ve budget. Check it out!

(For those of you unfamiliar with the term, swaddling involves using a square blanket and some specific folding techniques to wrap your child in a nice snug blanket cocoon. The power of this technique to soothe babies and help them sleep longer lies in two simple facts: 1) It simulates the cozy, if restricted environment they were so used to living in for nine months in the womb. This familiarity is comforting to them. 2) It prevents them from flailing around and hitting or scaring themselves. Infants don’t have control over their appendages, nor do they even really recognize that those things flailing around and, at times, whacking them in the face even belong to them. Swaddling prevents the unexpected appearance of said appendages by keeping them snugly tucked in near the infant’s body.)

In one of the first weeks after my discovery of swaddling, I was spouting off about my discovery of this miracle tool at my regular writer’s group meeting and the joy of having eight hour of sleep in a row. As I spoke, the eyes of Carrie Gallant, a fellow writer and a specialist in the art of negotiation for women, lit up with a laugh.

“That is amazing,” she commented, “On the drive here today I was just thinking about swaddling and how that is what I need to keep me focused on key areas I need to build my business and keep me from flailing around trying to do so many different things.”

A lively discussion about swaddling as a metaphor for the value of coaching and for the kind of support necessary for success ensued. Here are the main points:

We are like babies. When faced with change, whether internally imposed by our attempt to learn and grow or externally imposed by a change in our environment/circumstances we flail around a lot, fall down, and generally spend more time getting it wrong than getting it right. This is scary, frustrating and exhausting. We don’t understand that the appendage that keeps hitting us in the face actually belongs to us. Having a mentor or coach helps to gently restrain us from hurting ourselves. It wraps us in a cocoon of confidence from the assurance of someone else’s experience so that we can relax and rest awhile before getting back to the inevitable work of growing.

Just like our son, Zen, most people rebel against swaddling at first. Free choice is part of the gift of being human, so it is natural to dislike being given limits. Yet it is precisely by creating boundaries for ourselves, setting limits, and enforcing deadlines that we also create freedom – the freedom that comes from following something through to completion.

Andrea Jacques

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