One big weird area of fear for me is talking on the phone.

I think I share this with a lot of geeks and ex-geeks.  We’d do almost anything to not communicate through the phone.

Blessedly, I’m missing the fear of talking face-to-face, and have gotten over the fear of talking to audiences.  But the phone remains an open wound, so to speak, in the Fearless Body.

As with my post on “Mindfulness and Chutzpah” last month, one challenge here is to be aware of the fear in the moment, i.e., right when mindfulness might allow me to choose to use the phone even if I’m afraid.  What often happens is I just go off on a non-phone-using course without it even coming to mind in any conscious fashion.  Obviously there’s no way to get control over a fear which doesn’t come into consciousness.

So this month one challenge is to remain aware of moments when I’m running away from using the phone without allowing the moment to pass.

I’ve noticed the past couple of weeks that asking for favors for me – just me, not me on behalf of some larger entity like an employer or my children or a non-profit – has gotten easier for me.

Asking for these kinds of favors – “would you look at my manuscript?”, “can I pitch you a story idea?”, even “will you go out with me” back in the day – was always pretty difficult for me.  I would rehearse multiple times asking a girl out as a teenager.  I still do some rehearsing with phone calls where I’m asking something from someone I consider more important than me.

And this kind of rehearsal helps with defusing the negative Voice of Failure from within, because one can anticipate every derogatory thing the person on the other end of the phone might say and plan comebacks, all in advance.

But the last couple of weeks, as I say, I’ve had less dread about these asks, and have even just picked up the phone once or twice (ok, I’m exaggerating: not the phone, but picked up the keyboard for an email) and quickly dashed off a request for a favor.

Like a lot of these Notes from the Field, hard to attribute to any of my Interventions so far, but at least, as we say in the investing business, the needle is moving in the right direction.

Well, February flew by, chutzpah-wise, and not just because it has fewer days.  Startup of the Project consumed more cycles than one would have thought (doesn’t it always?), and remaining mindful of the month’s Four Interventions was more problematic than I would have thought going into it.

So much so that I’m going to continue two of the Interventions – “Associate with People with Chutzpah” and “Become Aware of What You’re Afraid Of” – into March.

Together with two new ones: “Work with Enemies”, and “Do What You’re Afraid Of.”

“Do What You’re Afraid Of” ratchets up the fear factor from simply being aware of something terrifying to actually doing the terrifying thing, or doing part of it.

Two possibilities: this will terrify me so much that I’ll just become even less mindful of fearful things, or it will force them more into the foreground.  We’ll see.

The other Intervention, “Work With Enemies”, is trying to develop chutzpah by stretching me out of working only with people I like.  What a limitation!  How liberating it would be to be free of it.

And then, of course, continue with “Dare to Fawn” and “Become Aware of What You’re Afraid Of”.

Looks like a great March!

Coming home from my wife’s meetings today, I was thinking about opportunities I’d had to deploy the Four Interventions and grow in chutzpah.

It occurred to me that most of the time when I chanced on chutzpah opportunities (and most of them this week were in the Dare to Fawn department), a lot depended on the delivery.

Duh, I guess.  Probably obvious when you’re not in the midst of a situation.  In the midst of things, I see, if I’m lucky, an opportunity to manifest more chutzpah and then I have to do something then and there without having had any chance to think things over or rehearse alternatives, and, to be frank, I do lame stuff.

Lame fawning is painful to watch and painful to generate.  Maybe the most painful thing that happens is that I say things I don’t believe because I think they will impress the person I’m trying to fawn on.

Well, surprise, fawning that smacks of inauthenticity is just as painful to receive as it is to give.  People can’t always tell when someone is sincere, but most of us can tell really easily when someone is insincere.  It’s obvious.

So, looks like there’s some measure of preparation that has to take place here.  It’s like improvising music.  You practice common melodies and licks and chops, and then when you are solo-ing you pick from your library but remain spontaneous.

I need to build up a library of fawning.

I’m at some professional meetings for my wife, trying to help her by shmoozing and charming her friends, colleagues, and potential supporters.

At breakfast a man who sits next to me strikes up conversation and turns out to be an elder statesman of my wife’s world, a man eminently worth shmoozing.

The prescription?

• Expand my footprint with Big Body Language, lean towards him, take up space.
• Dare To Fawn, by telling him how great his taste in food is, how the organization is not the same without his leadership.  These are all true, so easier to fawn about.

What happened instead?

I essentially… blanked out.  I stammered out some stuff about the food, and fairly quickly made an excuse about having to do some work and fled the scene.

Once I got a safe distance away I realized what had happened: I had failed to Be Aware of My Fears.  Failed without even the opportunity to recognize what was going on.  I was thrown into a state where the only thing I could think about clearly was getting away.

So mindfulness has to precede chutzpah.  I have to let myself be aware that a Chutzpah Opportunity is being short-circuited by fear and consciously put a stop to it.

Do-able, I guess, but mindfulness is never easy.

On paper, this makes a lot of sense.  After all, it stands to reason that you are, in part, whom you associate with.  They rub off on you, for better or for worse.

But I’ve had trouble generating action items for this chutzpah intervention.  Part of it is that I already pick people for their chutzpah superiority to me.  Not sure why, but I do.  My wife has more chutzpah than I do.  My best friend today has more chutzpah than me – way more.  I’ve always been drawn to a type of guy friend with chutzpah levels that floor me when I think about it.  But I don’t.  I like them.

And at the same time I pull away from people who lack chutzpah.  An old friend needs my help, but I’ve been putting off engaging with him because he is so lacking in chutzpah it drives me away.

Maybe I should just take a “bye” on this intervention?  That would require some chutzpah!

At first glance, fawning – “giving a servile display of exaggerated flattery or affection, typically in order to gain favor” – seems like the opposite of chutzpah.

But because I’m a geek, and for all the geeks out there, fawning is actually something that requires chutzpah of us.

Why?  We want to be totally “honest”, meaning we don’t want to act like we’re seeking power or influence for ourselves.  And fawning – which is done in order to advance one’s own agenda – requires a certain amount of inner daring: “dammit, I’m going to get out there and get mine”.  In short, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to fawn.

Plus, fawning is a performance. It requires daring to get out there and act like someone you’re not.  Half the appeal of “honesty” is that you don’t have to risk failure.  The excuse that you were just being honest is a fallback.

Thus, I submit that fawning is a weapon in the quiver of he-who-has-chutzpah, and I would certainly claim that the effort to fawn when it’s not your nature requires a certain stock of chutzpah to begin with.

“The 48 Laws of Power” recounts how Galileo had the chutzpah to fawn on Cosimo II, featuring him and Medici dynasty as the earthly counterpart of the moons of Jupiter he had just discovered.  As “48 laws has it,”

Galileo turned his discovery of Jupiter’s moons into a cosmic event honoring the Medicis’ greatness… Cosimo II made Galileo his official court philosopher and mathematician, with a full salary.  For a scientist this was the coup of a lifetime.  The days of begging for patronage were over.

If a giant like Galileo can make the chutzpah-to-fawn pay off for him, why can’t it work for me?

I’m sadly not that attentive to possible longer-term effects of my 2 minutes of morning Big Body Language during the day, but I did become aware of two subtle sensations during my sessions yesterday and today:

Yesterday: When I stand in Wonder Woman pose in my home office I often look over the books on my bookshelves to pass the time during the 2 minutes.  And my reflections are usually pretty somber: “So many books unread, and so few I’m reading per week, and so few weeks left…”  Just vintage pessimistic aging thoughts.

But yesterday my eye traipsed across “Software Factories”, a ‘90’s book about competing in a flat world by using very productive high-level software languages.  I associate this book with Michael Cusumano at MIT Sloan School although a deeper look at the book just now showed me it was written by Jack Greenfield and Keith Short (“with” some others). two Micro-softies.  In any case, good book, very thoughtful, no matter I’m having a Senior Moment with the author’s name(s).

From the Chutzpah point of view, I had had it in mind to speak with Cusumano for some time on this topic, and had not moved further with it because of Chutzpah Deficit.  But now, in the heart of a 2-minute Big Body Language session, I said to myself, “Why not?  You’re a bright guy with some interesting ideas?  Why wouldn’t Cusumano want to talk with you?”

(And further, just now, I even took the next step and verified that Cusumano is not even the right guy to talk to!  Talk about progress!  More strides than I’ve made in three years of listing this on my to-do list!  Fruits of Big Body Language?  Correlation is not, of course, causation, but it is a first cousin.

Today:  Yet again in Wonder Woman pose, looking around my room.  All of a sudden I began to notice (and self-admire) how much more muscular my body felt since I resumed weight training in mid-December.  Harmless narcissism, one would say, except that it involves chutzpah as well as narcissism.  The body was there before the 2-minute session.  Presumably the narcissism was as well.  Didn’t the Big Body Language supply the chutzpah?

Too soon to say, but these are new thoughts.

Here are the four new practices I’m going to add to my life – or attempt to add to my life – during February.  I’ll say more about each in subsequent posts (I plan to post 3x/week btw, and fine tune if that’s too often or too infrequent).

1. Big Body Language.  There is some evidence that simply increasing the size of your body language (in the same way that peacock spreads its tail or a dog raises the hair on its neck) increases your chutzpah.  This is the “get down on your knees and move your lips in prayer and you will start to believe in G-d” school of behavior change.
2. Do What You’re Afraid Of.  As we will explore, there’s an intimate connection between chutzpah and fear.  Actually, for February, I’ll try not (yet) to do what I’m afraid of but simply to be aware of what I’m afraid of.  Start small but steady.
3. Dare to Fawn.  Seems like an oxymoron on the surface, but I believe that deliberate fawning is a tool of chutzpah growth.  More soon.
4. Associate with people who have Chutzpah.  You are who you associate with, or so the story goes.  Don’t lurk in the shadows with the chutzpah-poor.  Get out in the floodlights with the chutzpah crowd.

Wish me luck.