I'm nobody. There; I said it. But boy, how I wish I were somebody. in my childhood dreams, I'd always seen myself as the small town hero that would eventually come back home and deliver some great news; something different that would put the city into the scene and make people remember my name as a source of indelible pride. Maybe I'd be a guitar player. Maybe I'd be a soccer player. Maybe I'd be a famous tennis player. Whatever I'd be, in my dreams I was someone that could move people, make them feel good about themselves, awake their passions. I'd be someone with some sort of x-factor that nobody knew about; an x-factor that everybody else had failed to notice but a selected few, who would eventually discover me out there.
I have no x-factor, though. It turns out that I haven't become great in anything. I am an ordinary guy who wanted to have ‘the voice’ to attract a multitude of people. I am an ordinary guy who wanted to be special in some way, who wanted to be courageous and have the guts to go out there and expose himself to ridicule or to great things despite the odds of the former or the latter.
And that's why I love talent shows so much.
Talent shows are a chance to transform the ordinary into extraordinary. Talent shows talk to our notional - we look at people and we judge them in a split second. We laugh hard when people fail and we criticize them. "How come they did that?" "Don't they know how bad they are at what they are trying to do?" "How do they have the guts to expose themselves that way?" We feel ashamed of ourselves as if we were there on stage, only to feel blessed to remember that we are not.
Talent shows also talk to our notional when things go well. A flood of 'what-ifs' invades our minds and makes us question everything we've done so far. "What if I were brave enough back in 1993 to pursue that crazy dream? What if I performed that song, and people really thought I was great at it? What if I could let go of my fear of embarrassment for 5 minutes and take on the world as if those minutes were my last ones? What if I succeeded?"
And when we see them succeed, there is something huge inside our hearts - it is hard to explain.
We choke, our hearts race, our eyes tear up - we feel goosebumps all over our bodies. We celebrate quietly while we try to control the tsunami of emotions overwhelming us. In those tiny moments, we put ourselves in their shoes and we transform their experience into ours. For those few moments, we become them; they represent us; they provide us the victories and dreams we’ve never had. Our own villains become heroes for a moment. Our ghosts can be seen and we love to be seen. They show us what might have happened if and when we had been brave enough to let go of our own pride.
But pride is hard to let go of, even when you have very little to be proud of. And this is something that I talk from personal experience.
In my dreams of grandeur, tennis became the expletive, the conduit, the expression I had locked on to prove my sense of self-worth. As years passed, I did get better at the game, but not good enough to make any real thing out of it. My biggest accomplishment in tennis also constitutes a proxy for the mind prison I have so long lived in.
You see, at 16, after going to a tennis clinic, winning a local tournament and being invited to join a tennis team, I felt like I was in the verge of conquering my heroic dreams. It’d be beautiful. I’d return to my small town, I’d be somebody. I’d go away to accomplish big things and then return as a hero. And then life taught me the difference between expectation and reality and how big of a challenge it is to balance those two.
Expectations are a source of anxiety and energy, of frustration and goal-setting. Expectations are important and dangerous: they help us set challenging objectives, but they may also lead us to a reality disconnection. Expectations are even more dangerous when they lead us to live in a mental prison like the one I am only now freeing myself from. A mental prison that hinders your development; that makes you scary of trying new routes and ways for the fear of losing face; a face that never existed in the first place.
It is one thing to set high expectations and deal with the downfall they may bring. It is another thing to set high expectations and not accept the gap reality insists on rubbing on our faces. When the latter happens, we get stuck, we get defensive, we become ashamed. Ashamed that we have fallen short of our own expectations; ashamed because the person in the mirror is not exactly what that very same person had projected years ago.
Incapable of dealing with the frustration of ‘what-is’ compared to ‘what-should-be’, we trick ourselves into a world of lack. We need more of something, anything - more victories, more wins, more money, more recognition, more obedience, more leadership - that can protect us from bringing that shame to light. If we do manage to win, we still fear being a fraud. Therefore, we need to win more, once more, to show that we are not a fraud. And the endless cycle has begun.
If we lose, there is pain, there is anger, there is more shame. And the way out is usually found by assigning blame to somebody else, to some element of the weather, to some uncontrollable factor surrounding us or by feeding up the sense of lacking, of missing. Back to the cycle of needing more.
That’s what happened to me.
I left my town imagining I’d be a great tennis player and, instead of a glorified comeback, I returned to the same place I was before, back under my parent’s wings, bruised by the big fall I had just had - I was not good enough as I thought I could be. I failed. I failed at my life’s dream. Simon Cowell had told me publicly that I should consider routes other than tennis.
How could I meet my friends now and look them in the eye? I was supposed to be somebody, but instead I am the same guy of before, with one slight nuance - I had tasted failure; I had seen the gap between my expectations and the harsh reality. I think that’s why I avoided getting back onto a tennis court for so many years. Every time I dared to enter one, I felt like it was another chance to prove my worth as if the victory on a match that matters nothing could take me back to the past and alter reality.
Winning any senseless match was, in a way, a chance for me to prove that the world hadn’t quite gotten me; a chance to show the world was the problem, not me, not my lack of talent, not my non-commitment to making it or dying from it. Any match became a puzzle of ‘what-ifs’ in my mind just like the ones I always have by watching talent shows.
When I finally started playing tennis again - first because I still love it and second because I needed to lose some weight - I couldn’t come to terms with losses in any match. My pride, still stuck to my past-that-never-was and to what I thought I should be, surrounded me like quicksand, making it impossible for me to evolve in any direction because of my fear of losing.
It took me two years and a shoulder lesion to finally understand that as long as I kept holding on to my pride nothing new would happen to me on a tennis court. The lesion forced me to change the way I hit my backhand, from a one-hander to a two-hander. It might sound like a simple change, but it is a complicated one in the world of tennis because there are many adaptations that are required - positioning, ball contact, hand and arms coordination - to mention a few. It shouldn’t be a big deal for someone whose life does not depend on winning tennis matches. Funny though, the change has been extremely hard to make, not so much because of the technique per se, but rather because of my pride.
Changing meant losing even more, made an existing weakness clearer to adversaries, made me even more foolish on the court as even the most basic shots had now become a huge challenge. Changing made me confront my preconceived notions and my self-projected image versus my real person on a court.
I am still in this learning process, but the speed of change has advanced much after I stopped pretending to a be a player I am not. That has freed me from internal pressure and false expectations, which, paradoxically, has brought me better results.
That’s what I think happens to many leaders, teams, and organizations out there.
They get stuck in their past, in their ideals of how things should be instead of how things really are. While stuck in the-past-that-never-was, team members look for extraneous factors to assign blame to or for excuses that can hide the shame they feel for falling short on their what-should-be scenarios.
As leaders and team members, we want to pick up our gauntlets and take on the stages of “the voice” but we fear failure too much. We select to put pressure on leaders as if the leaders alone were able to change the group mindset and determine, almost as if they had some sort of x-factor, the outcomes of any choice.
As leaders, we fear what might happen if we clearly state that we don't know the answer to something. "Shouldn't I be the one telling people what to do?" We create these grand images of what a leader is and forget that the orchestra and maestro are one and only.
When we become leaders, there seems to be a rush of thoughts to our heads. We start creating this narrative, this story about how things should be, how we will play our central roles in this new hit movie that our leadership will become. Sometimes, we end up making decisions not to benefit all, but rather, on some occasions, to save face; to keep our egos boasted. We get scared of the unknown and we start posturing to match up our projected image to reality. "How will they perceive me as a leader if I don't show that I know?"
And that's the beauty of life and leadership. It is not about knowing. It is about navigating the unknown. It is about discovering!
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