Starting Something New

Sometimes, getting started is the hardest part. Here's a few ways to make it easier.

Do you hear that sound? All around the world, millions of people are starting something new. Some are starting new jobs or businesses, others are starting to change the way they live their lives.

Whatever the reason, change can be hard. Today I’m sharing thoughts about how to start two very different kinds of things.

These are reminders to myself as I start a new job, and I hope you’ll find them helpful, too.

Starting by Stopping

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

On New Year’s Eve, I saw an amusing sign. I think it was a warning about drunk driving. It read:

Nothing good happens after midnight.

For sober people like me, that’s only half true. From the time I quit drinking, I noticed that nothing good could happen at nearly any time of day.

I’m joking, of course. I didn’t take to sobriety overnight, but I’m very comfortable with it these days. Like coffee, it’s an acquired taste. I didn’t care for it at first, but it’s slowly grown on me.

I don’t write about it much. Truly, that’s out of respect for all of you. When I was drinking, I hated reading about people who weren’t, and the memory of the low-key condescension is still fresh in my mind.

A friend asked about it, so today I’ll make an exception and share a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Peace and Calm

The gift of sobriety for me has been one of a long and lingering sense of tranquility. When I gave up that kind of partying, it left behind an empty space. A feeling of peace and calm has crept in to that space, slowly and silently, in a liminal way between intention and accident. I’ve realized when I gave up drinking, I only lost something that I didn’t really need, and in return I gained something precious that I never knew was missing.

Small-scale daily disasters seemed to occur on the regular when I was high, and occasionally some truly terrible thing would dependably occur. I knew that I drank, at least in part, to control my anxiety. And yet I’ve found when I removed the alcohol a lot of that anxiety seemed to leave along with it.

Like nearly everything that’s good for you, sobriety can be pretty fucking boring. But I can count on my occasionally deficient judgement and poorly-installed verbal filter to inject some unnecessary drama when it’s really needed.

I’m not sure if I’m any less likely to say something stupid in an awkward social situation, but I’m definitely more likely to be forgiven for it.

Our NDA: Newsletter Disclosure Agreement

There’s one secret of sober people that we don’t ever talk about. Technically I’m not even supposed to be telling you this, but here goes:

Being sober gives you the capability to be interesting for not doing something.

It’s like a superpower! You can go to a party, and while everybody else is awkwardly trying their hardest to be compelling or hilarious or whatever, you can be captivating and mysterious without even opening your mouth.

I’ve come to believe that this must be what being very beautiful is like. Perhaps one of you very beautiful people reading this will let me know.

On Sober January

If it sounds appealing to you, give it a try. Nothing bad will happen to you. Changing the way you live for even a few days, or a few hours, can help you learn something surprising about yourself.

Here’s something I say often to my clients:

You know for sure that you can do what you have done.

If you can do it for a day, you can do it for two. If you can get through a wedding sober, you can do a vacation. A week can be a month, and a month can be a year. There was a time that it seemed impossible to me that I could make it five full years without anything stronger than a Red Bull.

People struggle mightily with drugs and alcohol, and those who love them might pay an equally high price. Everyone has to travel their own path with this stuff. I don’t mean to say it was easy for me, or that it will be for you.

I do mean to say that if you’re every looking to talk to somebody about sobriety or the lack of it, I’m here for you.

Your New New Thing

Photo by Keisuke Higashio on Unsplash

If you’re starting a new job this year, congratulations! With everything that’s going on in the corporate world, I’m not sure that celebration is even appropriate.

I coach so many people on finding new or better jobs in the corporate world, and so many others on the stress and trauma they’re experiencing because of those jobs. It’s a bit like we’re all trying to break into the world’s weirdest prison.

Among the many insane things about our corporate culture is the very poor attention paid to newly-hired people. Believe it or not, the word we use to describe this — “onboarding” — was invented fairly recently. It’s quite a strange word. It evokes the Rumsfeld-era word “waterboarding”… but let’s hope the similarities end there.

Since onboarding is such a fresh concept, it should come as no surprise that few really good ideas about it seem to have yet taken hold. It seems bizarre that so many people will experience interminably endless training programs packed with harrowing examples of things that employees must not do, but very little advice — if any — on what they should.

Day One

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

In your first weeks on the job, you’re meant to be learning — not performing.

Imagine someone who shows up for their first piano lesson, boasts of their extensive musical “experience”, dismisses well-meaning offers of instruction and partnership, then strides confidently up to the instrument and, with a dramatic flourish, begins banging manically on the keyboard with two balled fists as though fending off the advances of 88 tiny monochromatic attackers.

And yet, many feel pressure to deliver a virtuoso performance from their first day. The pressure owes in part to the interminably long, oddly specific, yet only marginally relevant interview process. It’s ostensibly meant to ensure you’re nominally qualified for the job, but always seems to stop short of telling you anything useful about what it really is.

In fact, your experience qualifies you for the task of learning how to do the job. Only practice can make you competent at performing it. Everybody knows this, but it’s rarely properly acknowledged.

Nobody needs a new employee to act like they know what they’re doing on their first day, or week, or month. Nobody wants to work with someone who seems to be pretending to know what they’re doing.

Everybody has worked with someone like this — someone obviously desperate to conceal their ignorance, furiously trying to give a performance that is, sadly, fooling nobody. They’re trying to conceal what should be celebrated — the fresh eyes and naive perspective of someone who has not yet been captured and overwhelmed by institutional momentum.

Let your newbie hang all the way out. People respect and admire a collaborator who is curious, inquisitive, engaged, vulnerable, and humble. Forget about trying to out-do your predecessor or wow people with your extemporaneous great ideas.

Keep your mouth shut, hold your cap in your hand, and look for people who can help you find your way around. Find safe spaces to ask stupid questions, and find the safe people to ask them of. Decline no offers of coffee nor lunch. Focus on building the relationships and partnerships that will last long after the memory of your accomplishments as a rookie have faded.

Set reasonable, achievable expectations for yourself, put them in writing, and share them with your colleagues. Ask them for feedback on the goals you’ve set for yourself, and carefully take stock of the wisdom you receive in return.

Here’s a recipe for a cadence of behavior that I have repeatedly seen earn trust and respect from a new team:

1. Put in writing what you’re going to do each week,

2. Do that thing, or at least try,

3. Report your progress at the beginning of the next week.

When you report your progress, try saying “Last week I said I was going to do X, Y, and Z. Here’s how that went.” Your primary goal when you’re new in a role is to build relationships and establish trust, and the simple method of setting goals and holding yourself accountable in public is a great way to do that.

When All Else Fails

My grandmother would often repeat what she called an old Bohemian proverb:

Things will all turn out in the end. If not well, then badly.

The risk of failure is never higher than when you’re starting something new. You could find that the goals that you set for yourself weren’t realistic, or that you’re not fitting in at a new job the way that you’d hoped.

I’ve learned that there’s one thing that is a surefire way to mitigate any failure, and that’s to be early to admit it.

That’s a lot easier to say than to do. There’s science to back this up, and there are hard-wired cognitive biases to overcome like the “sunk cost fallacy”, confirmation bias.

I haven’t seen research on it, but I think there’s a patriarchal stereotype that reinforces the idea that leaders must always be correct. I also can’t prove that a more modern, empathetic model for leaders are taking hold, but I want it to be true, and I like the idea that we’re sticking it to the patriarchy if we do. Hooray!

I think it’s especially hard to admit we’re wrong about important life decisions, or about business decisions that we’ve conspicuously sworn ourselves and our teams up to. On the other hand, I’ve observed a groundswell of respect and compassion for leaders when they dispassionately admit their errors and see to a swift course correction.

That’s the kind of leader I want to be. something I’m going to start focusing on this year: Admitting when I’m wrong, and making myself open to hearing what I’m wrong about from the people I work with.

That’s something that I can start doing today. I hope I’m successful at it, and I hope your new year is successful, too.