So, yesterday, I had a big meeting to attend, one where I’m supposed to do great things but in fact have been pretty much unnoticed in the hustle and bustle (somehow, despite my charm and good looks…).

In the past, I’ve longed to get out of going, and have used some excuses to do so.

And yesterday morning I was full of them: I had gotten in late the night before, there had been a chance I’d be out of town that day anyhow (which meant, I thought, that I wouldn’t be missed).

But because of mindfulness, I had an inkling that these were excuses, and what was lurking beneath was The Fear: they will ignore me (which, as I have said, is a big one for me).

I didn’t have enough direct chutzpah to get myself to go to the meeting anyhow, but I had enough to ask for help: I asked my wife what she would do.

She said, “You might as well go; something good may happen.”

And that was enough to tip me.  I went, and it was in fact quite good.  I spoke up, I got noticed (by some for the first time).  I made a splash: a very mild one, but a splash, instead of a no-show.

Mindfulness + asking for help = different outcome.

As I start tooling up to speak up more, it occurs to me that you can be a jerk about speaking truth to power.

There’s a way of doing it that makes you lose credibility instead of gaining it.  If you wade in with a “take-no-prisoners” attitude and blurt out your truth, it’s as if you hadn’t said anything.

In “48 Laws of Power”, one of the laws has to do with this.  It’s “Don’t argue with your superiors, but demonstrate the truth of what you say indirectly.”  That’s part of it.  A standoff – opinion against opinion – with a powerful superior just ends up with all your supporters and all your support evaporating and a conclusion that, even if you’re on to something, it couldn’t amount to much.

Demonstrating, to the contrary, invites others, including your powerful superior, to draw their own conclusions about the “facts” (although, of course, the conclusions are yours all along).

I’d love to get better at demonstrating as part of speaking truth to power.

Since I started the “Learn to Love the Phone” intervention in April, I’ve noticed a big down-tick in my habit of running away from phone calls with emails.

It goes like this: the right thing to do is to call X, but instead of calling her, I talk myself into sending her an email “first”.  “Rude to interrupt someone without teeing it up first.”  That kind of thing.

What inevitably happens is that X doesn’t respond to the email.  May not even notice it.  And that gives me an excuse to defer the phone call: “haven’t heard back from X”.

Chutzpah giants around me don’t waste any time worrying about being rude interrupters.  They want to reach out, they reach out.  Phone first.

That’s my next step.

You know, I didn’t make any progress to speak of on the four interventions for April, except for the thing of listing daily fears.  So I’m going to continue that one, and continue three more from April.

Here’s the May lineup:

• List Every Day the things you were afraid of that day
• Be Interesting when you enter the stage
• Learn to Love the Phone
• Speak Truth to Power

As I track the daily fear parade – and it’s even hard to remember fears from that same day, although not as hard as trying to be aware of them in advance – one theme that’s emerging is I am very afraid of criticism, or maybe even I am afraid of how angry I get when I get criticized.

Not sure which of these makes more sense.  My kneejerk reaction to criticism is: incoming harm.  And my immediate reaction is to lash back at the person delivering it, with sarcasm and witty retorts if not with blows.

I want to watch this a bit more – and hopefully be aware of it in the moment increasingly – before I come to conclusions about what it is and what to do about it, but it seems like a daily recurring thread of fear, and hence, daily recurring oppty for chutzpah.

I read something this morning, an inspirational quote on the website of a local Quantified Self gym, which was trying to tie fitness to work/life balance:

Life is crazy. We all know it. Juggling several things all at the same time. I’m proving that no matter what is happening in my life, my fitness gives me the physical and mental balance to take everything in stride — and enjoy it!

I know; that’s nuts; fitting in fitness does more to clobber your work-life balance than almost anything, especially when you get to be my age and the jogging, stretching, resting, flexing, flossing, just pile up to an unholy percentage of each day.

But there was something to it as well: feeling fit makes you feel better, which makes you feel more equal to things.  It fuels your chutzpah.

OK, so I’m writing down, more or less at the end of the day, all the things I can recall being afraid of that day:

• Losing my job
• People who are angry with me because I’m wronging them, or so they think
• Strangers
• Neighborhoods I haven’t been to

But a) it’s hard to remember this stuff, even that day, and b) it doesn’t seem to make me any more mindful when fear happens, at the moment of fear.  Well, maybe a tiny bit more mindful, but nothing game-changing.

I’ll stick with it, and see if the mindfulness just comes more slowly than I would like.

Richard Branson dares to do all kinds of things, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

So did Baba Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert).  “Wherever you are, there you are,” was his watchword.  In other words, make the best of your situation.

Neither of these guys is (or was) trying to “execute a chutzpah agenda.”  They were trying to live out the idea that their Self had a narrative that had to be discovered and “honored”.