Do It Afraid

(Source: Unsplash/Patrick Mueller.)

A week before Thanksgiving, I slipped into a white lace dress and heels, clutched the bouquet a friend made for me, and waited at the top of a living room stairway at a friend’s house in Austin, Texas. At the bottom of the stairs, the room was full of flowers, candles, and string lights, 30 people seated in chairs, and, most importantly, the man I had agreed to date 15 months ago at a pub in Waco. 

The morning after that agreement, I typed out an angsty email to him before catching a flight to Tennessee, warning him that I had a history of relationship anxiety, so he should pray often and tread carefully. The next year or so was a rollercoaster to say the least, but somewhere along the way, we fell in love and clung to each other, eventually (after three proposals) agreeing to get married. The fact that we made it here to a living room wedding (having been rained out of our original outdoor venue), had less to do with my relationship anxiety going away and much more to do with us figuring out how to push through it. 

At one point before the wedding, I sat down to write a newsletter for Cities Decoded, found myself reflecting on life, and decided to write about courage…specifically, the growing need for greater courage in city leadership. When thinking about the kinds of policies that could transform North American cities into more vibrant, resilient places, it seems to me that a serious obstacle—in addition to lack of vision—is a lack of courage.

The thing is, to save our cities, we need to try new ideas, and that’s scary. It might mean angering neighbors, saying “no” to developments that don’t fit your city’s identity, adjusting departmental budgets, or resisting trendy-but-ineffective policy experiments. None of these are easy decisions to consider (let alone make), but they are the kinds of decisions that our cities need if we’re ever going to move into a stronger, more resilient future. 

Yet, it’s one thing to say, “Buck up, kid; be brave,” and another to think about how fear actually works. Drawing on my own personal experience this past year and a half, here are five ways I’ve noticed fear can keep us paralyzed in our comfort zones. 

1. Fear downplays your ability to cope.

Most people who are afraid of a particular risk are understandably afraid of failure. But many are also afraid of the fact that they don’t know what will happen. Both the fear of failure and the fear of not knowing the outcome can be extremely paralyzing. For the people leading our cities, not knowing what might happen is terrifying enough to make them throw clever ideas into the desk drawer and never look at them again. 

The thing is, fear is telling a true story. Yes, failure is possible and that would be embarrassing and, yes, it’s extremely undesirable to try something if you don’t know what will happen. But fear will also leave out an important part of the story and fail to remind you that humans are extremely capable of coping with failure and uncertainty, extremely capable of learning and adjusting. 

This is why, at Strong Towns, we are so adamant about incrementalism: If you’re afraid of trying an idea that could make your city better, try a small, cheap version first. In doing so, you’ll begin to gain interesting data about how that idea affects the public sphere, but, more importantly, you’ll be strengthening your capacity for the discomfort of uncertainty. This discomfort may never go away, but that’s never the goal. The goal is to learn to tolerate uncertainty and the possibility of failure, comforting yourself that you possess that uniquely human knack for learning from such incidents and responding with creativity. 

2. Fear makes everything black and white, avoiding nuance.

I once read an article that described fear as a loud, urgent, demanding voice that framed every risky situation as something demanding immediate action. Not just that, but fearful attitudes and narratives tend to be those that organize situations into primitive binaries of “good/bad, black/white, safe/dangerous.” In contrast, intuition tends to appear as a calm, neutral voice rarely in a rush to cast judgments and more comfortable with the fact that most of life’s situations exist in a gray zone. 

But gray is hard to see when you’re afflicted with fear. It’s hard to look at things from a nuanced perspective, let alone consider different perspectives or come up with compromises. Unfortunately, this is unsuited to what’s needed in order to reimagine our neighborhoods and cities. We can’t wait for a line of action that’s perfectly good, safe, and certain in outcome. Nuance, experimentation, risk, and compromise are how cities emerged in the first place, and they’re the same mental habits we need if we’re going to break out of the status quo. 

3. Fear makes it difficult to consider new information or ideas.

Because fear is essentially protective, it has a vested interest in preserving the status quo. After all, the status quo is familiar and your brain associates “familiar” with “safe.” Introducing new ideas and information shakes up this familiarity and thrusts us back into uncertainty; cue the racing heartbeat and knots in the stomach. It’s not hard to see how this protective impulse makes our world safer, but it can also become entrapping. With a baked-in preference for the familiar, one can become trapped in a repetitive world that’s very comfortable, but also one in which they forgo many opportunities for growth. 

In cities, the familiarity bias keeps policy makers trapped in costly, ineffective, outdated frameworks, policies, and methodologies. Enormous amounts of energy go into preserving the way things have “always been done.” It’s simply too mentally overwhelming or frightening to consider that there might be a new way of doing things, and our cities suffer as a result. 

4. Fear makes it hard to hear feedback.

Don’t get me wrong: We need fear. It keeps us alive. It keeps us motivated. And, of course, we want our public leaders to be cautious and thoughtful about the potential consequences of their decisions. In fact, we probably need MORE cautious leaders who are less comfortable with taking on millions in debt, or with the number of fatalities on their roads.

But fear can also go too far, discouraging risk-taking and making it hard for us to grow. If we inhabit a fearful mindset for too long, we’ll develop a negative appetite for feedback and constructive criticism. Fear convinces us that the emotional discomfort of listening to criticism and feedback is simply too great. Yes, it’s scary to consider the possibility that the way you have been doing things might not be the best and that you need to change course. But what if the way we’re doing things is dangerous, ineffective, or wasteful? What happens if we never develop the capacity to cope with the emotional discomfort of realizing we need to make a change? 

In cities, this can be a costly error. Courageous city leaders are the ones who are willing to look at “the way things are”  and consider that maybe, just maybe, things need to change.

5. Action is the only thing that kills fear. Sometimes, you must do it afraid.  

Eventually, Rob and I got to a point in our relationship where it became clear that more talking wouldn’t help me feel less anxious about the prospect of getting married. Eventually, I’d have to take my intuition, reason, and perspective of other people, and make a decision, whether or not the fear and anxiety abated. 

Once, while discussing a creative project with my mom and all the reasons why I was too scared to move forward, she replied with, “Do it afraid.” The same principle applies in life, sometimes in relationships, and it also applies to anyone wanting to make their city better. 

Sometimes, you can’t afford to wait until you feel less afraid, you just have to identify a line of action and get moving, whether that’s going to city council meetings, proposing an unpopular new ordinance, or pushing back on budget-line items if you know they’ll push the city further into debt. Whatever it looks like for you, remember my mom’s advice and “do it afraid,” knees shaking and all.

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