Good-bye, Comfort Zone – The backflip
One Saturday afternoon I was swimming at a famous beach in Busan, South Korea, called Haewondae. The waves there are never usually very high, but there used to be a big mound of sand you could dive off of as the tide was coming up, and I walked out to the edge of it to try a backflip (probably with the intention of impressing a girl).
None of my backflips had ever seemed to impress anyone in the past, but this one did. It wasn’t the hot girls tanning on the blanket 20 feet away, though, that happened to take notice – it turned out to be something much better.
A ten-year old kid came up to me and said, “Hey, how do you do that?”
The only thing required to do a backflip – especially into water – is the balls to actually try. “Let me show you,” I said. “You just throw your head back and jump. There’s really nothing more to it than that.”
So he got up there and turned his back to the sea, waiting for the tide to come in. All at once about twenty to thirty people stopped what they were doing to watch. (Nobody gave a shit when I did it).
Ideally, when you’ve decided to try something new and out of your comfort zone, you’d like it to be when you’re by yourself or with a few close friends – not with the entire world watching. But with about a million people on the beach that day, this kid didn’t really have that option. So he got up there, looked back over his shoulder at the sea, bent his knees, and…. climbed back down.
“I can’t do it,” he said, looking at me all disappointed. “You mean, you can’t get yourself to TRY!” I said. “Ya, that’s what I mean,” he replied. But he got back up there again. And again, unable to overcome the same feeling he just had, he bent his knees a few more times, but never jumped. Only he didn’t get down this time. He stayed up there for a while, thinking about it, trying to will himself to do it, until finally… Nope. Same result.
This time, as he hopped back down from the mound of sand, his younger brother yelled, “Come on, man! Do it!” Almost totally dejected, he said, “I can’t.”
He looked at me like he wanted to cry. Just then, his mother came walking down from the concrete path that runs paralled to the beach and yelled, “Come on guys! Dad’s going to be here to pick us up in five minutes.”
As he started to grab his stuff to leave, he said to me, “I can’t do it, mister. And I guess I gotta go now. How did you learn to do that?” “EXACTLY like you just did,” I said. “Except I actually got myself to at least try.”
“Ya. I wish I could have just tried,” he said.
For some reason, feeling as if it was perfectly okay for me to play God, I felt the urge to treat this kid as if he were my own son – or at least a younger version of myself. “Don’t leave yet. Don’t give up!” I said. “What?” he asked. “Listen kid,” I told him. “When you get into your dad’s car, not only are you going to regret that you didn’t do it, but your brother’s going to remember that you didn’t even try. Why don’t you get back up there and give it one more shot?” “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”
At first, it was no different. He looked back over his shoulder as the tide came in, looked down, bent his knees, and hesitated. “Just do it!” his brother shouted. But then all of a sudden, BANG!
A perfect backflip. Perfect rotation and timing, and he came down feet first into the water. His backflip would have been fine even if he were landing in the sand, and as he came running out of the water to give me a huge hug, about thirty people who had been watching him the whole time gave him a round of applause.
No more than ten seconds later – having just missed what her son had just done – his mom was back. “Boys! Let’s go!” she shouted, in a slightly angrier tone. He grabbed his towel and backpack, and yelled, “Thanks mister,” and ran off with his brother. I just sat down on a towel for a second, probably with the same look on my face as Andy Dufresne in the movie Shawshank Redemption, when he’s in the confinery, and one of the guards tells him that the kid he’d been tutoring passed his test. The satisfaction was no less than it would have been were it the first backflip I’d done myself.
The Unexpected Reward
Just as the kid thought I had made his day, he had also made mine. And I thought it was over – but it wasn’t. About five minutes later, his mother came walking back down the beach towards me with an ice cream cone in her hand. “Excuse me, sir, but who are you?” she asked. “I’m nobody,” I said. “Here. Please take this,” she said, handing me the cone. “I don’t know what you just did, but I’ve never seen my son this happy in his whole life, and he said it’s because of you.”
“No, he made himself happy,” I said. “All I did was tell him he’ll feel better about himself if he tries.” “Well,” she replied, “whatever you did, thank you.” And walked away.
The sad part of this story is that I didn’t actually realize WHY he felt so happy, and I never gave much thought to that moment again. But about two years later, I learned a little more what triggers this kind of experience, and what we can do to bring it about on a more regular basis.
A Different Kind of Happiness
As we all know, THIS kind of happiness – the kind that follows the achievement of a goal or a new accomplishment – is not the same as the excitement we have when our grandma gives us a Nintendo for Christmas, or our mom tells us we can have ice cream after dinner, or our dad says we’re skipping school today to go to an amusement park. Those all have to do with anticipation- something we can look forward to. Pleasure.
But the ‘first ever backflip’ feeling is something entirely different. It’s one of growth.
The Growth Trigger
Here’s what happened that day at the beach; 1) The young boy saw something attractive, and was ignited. Something clicked inside, that said, ‘I want to be like that guy.’ This is usually something different, something that gives us a chance to be unique. And it’s usually something that’s currently outside of our comfort zone.
2) At the same time, he didn’t view the feat as an impossibility. He saw it as a task that had a real chance of being completed, especially after I told him that it wasn’t a complicated skill that required ten thousand hours of practice. All it took was the courage to overcome the fear.
3) It was a rare opportunity to express himself, and it wasn’t something he had a chance to do everyday. It’s like when you see a beautiful girl across the street you’d like to talk to, and you have to act now. You can’t tell yourself, ‘I can always come back tomorrow.’ (It didn’t hurt that I was there to remind him of that).
4) Finally, there was the added pressure of the image his brother was going to have of him. Was he going to be a hero, or a coward? Despite the round of applause he received from the crowd, I doubt he cared much about how he was perceived in the eyes of a bunch of strangers. But what his brother thought of him actually mattered.
I think it was also the first time in his life he had been challenged in this kind of way. It wasn’t the fact that he nailed the backflip that brought him joy. That was just an added bonus. The important thing was just that he had the balls to try. And the next time he’s called upon to summon the courage to take on a challenge or overcome another fear, he has this experience to fall back on. He can say, ‘Well, I got myself to do that backflip, so why can’t I try THIS?’ He’s a new man.
The sense of self that emerges at the end of the experience is now stronger. The person who gave himself permission to go outside his comfort zone has grown. He’s a little bigger. Thus, this kind of happiness comes from the feeling that one has expanded, rather than shrunk.
This is so much more powerful than standing in front of your bathroom mirror, telling yourself affirmations in the morning, like, ‘I am smart. I am brave. I am pretty.’ Because even if you can get yourself to actually believe it, the second you put your clothes on and walk outside the house, the rational part of your brain says, ‘Really, though? Let’s see.’
Try it for yourself. If you’d like to expand in some way, to turn yourself into something more than you are – to be kind, or funny, or brave, or disciplined – don’t TELL yourself, or try to convince yourself of something you have no reason to believe. SHOW yourself. Go do something that actually proves it. Give yourself some certifiable proof, and you won’t be able to convince yourself of anything otherwise – even if you try. The next time you hear yourself saying, ‘Come on, man. Get outta here. You’re not BRAVE,’ your rational mind can say, ‘Then how did I do that backflip?’
First part of the story gave me goosebumps!
I hope that’s a good thing.