Embrace Adventure From a Place of Safety
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Adventure and freedom are two of my core values. Yet I’ve learned that I can most honor those values when I come from a place of feeling safe and secure. The paradox is that safety provides the space for adventure. Safety is the low guardrails on a windy mountain road that provides the security to let you drive faster and accelerate out of the tight curves in a car that hugs the road.
If this resonates and you’re feeling the adventure, take stock of what’s safe and supportive in your life that’s allowing the risk to happen. And if you’re not feeling the yearning for risk-taking, it’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with you. Perhaps it’s not for you. Or if you’re hoping for something to be different in your life perhaps what needs to first change is building more of the foundation of safety.
Feeling Safe Provides the Space for Adventure
As the days get warmer and I’ve received both my Moderna vaccine shots, I’m feeling a bubbling yearning in my stomach that’s remembering the feeling of adventure and longing to experience it again. The past year and a half has simultaneously felt like a “lost year” and also a time of inward cocooning. It’s felt like I’ve missed out on travel, eating out, going to concerts, seeing friends and family, and also the camaraderie of working face to face with people. However, the pandemic has forced me to make space to be present and to focus on what’s happening right now. I’ve slowed down and done less. This has opened up more meaningful time with my girls, both at home and hiking together out in nature.
Over the past weekend, my partner and I took a grueling hike to Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe, California. It was one of the first times this past year that I’ve felt wild and free. We were able to get lost on the ambiguous trail, climb up seemingly impossible granite crevices, and fearfully wonder if we’d get caught by the approaching thunder & lightning storm. It was glorious.
This moment of adventure only worked because I was two weeks past my second vaccination. I was feeling COVID-invincible, and once that milestone of safety had been achieved, the yearning for travel exploded.
I see this juxtaposition of risk-taking and security in many leadership situations.
Leaders Show Possibilities and Let Others Choose Their Own Path
As a leader, one of my innate traits is that I’m challenging and fierce. People are drawn to me because I push them out of their comfort zone. However, that might not be the right path for them. My role is not to control their path. Instead, the role of a leader is to show different possibilities, to paint the picture of the future that they cannot see for themselves. It might be a future that’s most adventurous, most challenging, most innovative, most creative, most authentic—whatever it is that helps people see different perspectives. And ultimately, it’s up to the individual to choose their own path.
I’ve recently been supporting many people who are in the midst of career transitions and offer negotiations. When I work with women and people of color, I strongly encourage them to ask for more as this group has historically been severely underpaid. Recently I was working with a female leader. We were on the phone on Thursday night, and she wanted to immediately accept a job offer she’d just gotten. She wanted to wrap it up and have it over with on Friday so she could give notice at her current job and quickly plan for the future. It had been a long interview process and she was it. She was done with interviewing and done with all the chaos in her current job. We talked through what she really wanted. While I have a framework to get the best monetary results for salary negotiations and I shared that with her, it wasn’t the right path for her to take that day. That was exactly the right choice for her. Rather than pushing into an aggressive negotiation, she chose her own path that pushed her slightly out of her comfort zone— she waited until after the weekend to accept the job offer and then lightly asked for some things that mattered to her.
As leaders, we can show possibility. We open a corridor of doorways for people and they choose which door and the right time that they are ready to step through it. Often, realistically when managing a team that needs to meet organizational goals, we have to inspire and persuade the team that this is the path they want to take. Yet it’s always best to give people the autonomy to choose their own path.
Safety Provides a Support Net for Growth
As a leader, when we want to push our team members to grow and be better versions of themselves, consider how to put up a support net for them. When I worked at Facebook, I managed the design internship program. Individual contributor (IC) designers could apply or be nominated by their managers to manage an intern for three months. This was invaluable experience for ICs who wanted to transition to management. We provided a safety net of support so that the intern manager could experience actually managing another person in a safety net of support. The intern manager was given a structure to follow:
Identity goals and a project for the intern that could be completed and show impact over the three months
Schedule regular 1–1s with the intern
Monitor their intern’s performance against the goals and present/defend/rate their intern compared to all the other interns in a mid-way performance calibration process
At the last weeks of the three months, present their intern’s impact including a hire/no hire recommendation at the final performance calibration process
Deliver the final hire/ no hire decision (for future full-time employment) to the intern
Throughout this process each intern manager had a commitment of support from their manager as well as from me as the leader of the intern program. I had many conversations with intern managers who had to deliver negative news to their interns. It was a real situation—they learned the valuable leadership skills of empathy, managing someone else, communication, and how to hire and fire people. Most important was the feelings of accomplishment as a leader no matter what the outcome was.
This process provided a support net for the intern managers. They learned what it was like to manage. Some of them decided to go on to a long career as a strong manager, others decided that it wasn’t for them and that they preferred to lead as an individual designer. Most importantly, this safety net of the intern program allowed them to take risks, make mistakes, and grow into a new adventure.
Bottom Line
Feeling safe provides the space for adventure. I see this in my personal life after fifteen month in the introspective cocoon of social distancing. I see it with my clients who can take greater risks—leading to greater growth—when coming from a place of safety and security.