Making Learning My Job Reduced My Fear of Failure

This is a continuation of my previous post about my first steps towards creating my new future. [Read it here], then come back to this and see what happened next…

I’m experimenting with calling out how the muscles and mindsets of design served me along the way, and I’m finding my way to language that feels right for me. I’ll be curious if pointing these things out is helpful to you!

A Slowdown Brought Opportunity

By 2022, I had spent almost a decade outside of the agency world working as an independent designer. I acted as a hired brain for leaders who needed powerful insights and actionable strategies; I conducted and led research projects and strategy work, and I coached teams through their design challenges. I loved being brought in to apply my skills and provide a fresh perspective. My brain tingled when wrestling with complex challenges and I thrived in synthesis, the meaning-making part of the design process.

Towards the end of that year, several of my steady design clients had shared that 2023 would be a slow year—I couldn’t count on that income. It also meant that I was about to have some free time!*

Design Muscle: Reframing - Designers constantly challenge themselves to find alternative ways to look at something. Changing your perspective opens up new options.

What new perspectives might change the options available to you right now?

Can you think of five alternative ways for thinking about something in your life?

This is me tree climbing in college. The world looks different when you’re hanging upside-down from a tree!

Living within two conflicting truths was disorienting—I was content AND I had also become bored and wasn’t growing

I wasn’t the only one facing a slowdown in project work. When one of my most cherished design partners shared that she had decided to use her downtime to further her training as a coach, part of me felt a sense of panic. I remember feeling my body tighten up with internal resistance. As I considered whether to jump on the learning train, a temper tantrum erupted inside me, ”I don’t want to do it. You can’t make me!” 

With a growing pit in my stomach I wondered, "Would I be left behind?"

If you read the first part of this story, you’ll remember that I had been proud of cultivating a small, contented life. In allowing my life to get small, I enjoyed a level of peace I had never felt before, and I wasn’t quite ready to give it up.

Did I REALLY want to poke holes in my cozy little cocoon?

At this point, I hadn’t yet understood that I was ready for something new. Considering a career change 20 years in and on top was a threat I wasn’t ready to face. Yet that initial panic hinted at a deeper awareness lurking beneath the surface. At some level, I knew this was a first step towards something else. 

That pit in my stomach was trying to tell me that it was time to grow. 

I was resistant to leave my cocoon AND I was restless for more. I was caught in the tension of this dual truth, but I didn’t yet know it. I think now that my brain couldn’t fully embrace that truth until it could catch a peek at the other side. 

What are you resisting that you already know to be true?

What tensions are you balancing?

What clarity are you waiting for?

My bank account could take the hit if I chose to take a skillbatical. Not yet recognizing my growing dissatisfaction with design, I rationalized that it couldn't hurt to use this planned downtime to shore up my coaching skills—Exploring coaching was a smart proactive step! I was being so strategic! I also know that doing anything with a friend or partner makes it easier. I borrowed my friend’s initial courage and jumped in.

Design Mindset: Be opportunistic! Actively looking for the opportunity in a situation allows you to extract value from seemingly negative turns. Seeing a work slowdown as an opportunity fueled me and allowed me to nourish my value of growth.

What do you need to tell yourself in order to take the first step?

Permission to focus helped me manage my doubts and fears

With design work at a minimal drip (thanks, economy!), enough financial runway to weather not working for a while, and a mental commitment to explore for at least 6 months, I was free to commit to experimentation and play.

I gave myself permission to focus on learning.

The design process and my personal experience had taught me that the world would look differently on the other side of that learning. I knew I had to, "trust the process," a phrase I often use as shorthand. In 6 months, I would have more information to inform my next steps. Permission to focus on learning was vital, as I constantly wondered how to reconcile my growing coaching muscles with my design work. Although I’ve been coaching design teams for decades, coaching individuals one-on-one was a newer focus. How would one-on-one coaching fit in with my organizational focus? How would I monetize these new skills? Would I weave individual coaching in? Would I shift my focus completely?

The questions felt overwhelming and urgent.

When I felt unmoored by not knowing what the future held, this post-it note on my monitor reminded me that my only job was to learn.

When I felt unmoored by not knowing what the future held, a post-it note on my monitor reminded me that my only job was to learn. The mighty post-it can only do so much, even for me. I had a team. My co-conspirator friend’s shared excitement and my partner’s patient encouragement played crucial roles in defending me against distractions.

Who would you like on your team as you step outside your comfort zone?

As much as I had to actively self-manage to stay with the learning, there were also positive flickers along the way that encouraged me to stick with it. One-on-one coaching sessions felt intimate and deeply familiar. Creating space for people to come to personal insights felt alot like the in-depth ethnographic-style interviews I did in my Design Research work, without the extra requirement of meaning-making on my part after the fact. Could it be possible to focus solely on the magic of those conversations, detached from expectations of a design output or deliverable on my part? That felt too good to be true!

Design Muscles: Reflecting and Self-Awareness - It’s not enough to have an experience. Trying something new doesn’t mean much if you’re not also taking stock of your starting point, your assumptions, and your experiences along the way. Designers cultivate their ability to pay attention to what’s going on inside as well as around them, which helps them notice and evaluate subtle shifts. This noticing is neutral—we’re paying attention to what is going on, but we’re not explicitly judging it: “Oh, that’s interesting, coaching conversations are similar to research conversations in this way.” It’s neutral even when what we notice might not be: “Ack, I don’t like feeling exposed while I’m trying something new!!” and, “Oooh, I love how it feels when I help someone have a personal a-ha!”

Design Mindsets: Stay open, hold things lightly. As we reflect, we intentionally stay open to possibilities, we actively look for opportunities, and when we spot them, we hold them lightly. It’s a bit like the Buddhist idea of non-attachment. Flickers of opportunity are like baby birds—we don’t want to squash them or scare them away. And if we don’t get too attached, it’s fine if they fizzle out, aren’t quite a fit for us, or fail spectacularly. Our ego isn’t wrapped up in their success.

What do you know about yourself?

What are you noticing as you try something new?

Refining my coaching craft meant lots of practice. As an athlete, I’m good at practice. I take pleasure in drilling skills through repetition. To strengthen my new muscles, I needed reps and sets, and I had to accept that some of my coaching would be… not great. But it’s okay to suck during practice—that’s the whole point of it. When anchored in a learning journey, bad coaching is expected. Bad coaching meant there was still something for me to learn!

When was the last time you tried to learn something new or leaned into strengthening your weaknesses?

How did your framing impact your experience?

Making something your main job doesn’t require you to quit your current job. It’s a perspective, an orientation that re-orders how you engage with an experience. It’s a choice in prioritization that lowered the stakes and helped me get more out of the investment.

I find that giving my brain one job at a time helps to focus my mental chatter onto something productive. When I’m snowboarding, my only job might be to relax or to focus on my weight shifts, when I’m IN the experience of coaching or doing doula work, my only job is to listen and be. As I was getting my footing in this part of my story, making learning my only job allowed me to squeeze as much learning as possible out of the experience without getting ahead of myself and worrying about things that wouldn’t serve me. 

How might you make learning central to what you’re trying right now?

What would change if learning was your only job?

Taking risks can be scary, and living at the edge of your comfort zone can be exhausting. In my next post, I’ll share another framing that shifted both of these things for me. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!