Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 167: Trying New Things

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 167: Trying New Things Fable & The Verbivore

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This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing a special episode on trying new things. And, appropriately, this also just so happens to be our 3rd anniversary of the creation of this podcast!

Back spring of this year we challenged each other to choose to do something that scares us over the next six months. We both ended up doing more than one thing. Today, we each share two of those things that scared and excited us, but we decided to step out and try anyway - along with some of our takeaways from those experiences.

For the Verbivore, this included developing and teaching our first ever $5 Writing Class on the film Jurassic Park, and intuitively writing and submitting the most personal essay that she’s ever written to the June 2022 Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition. For Fable, this involved going for the first time to a poetry writing group and reading aloud three of her poems, as well as submitting a selection of her poems to an online poetry publisher.

Here are a few of the lessons we feel this practice taught us:

  • Making a commitment to try something that scares us can serve as a much-needed little push outside our comfort zone and can help us notice and consider opportunities that we previously weren’t aware were there

  • The more practice we have with sharing our work in different ways the less intimidating it becomes and the more likely we’ll continue to give ourselves the invitation to share or even proactively seek out opportunities to put our work out in the world

  • This experience helps teach the difference between what it feels like when there’s something we’re intimidated by but interested in trying and the things we don’t have much curiosity for

  • The more we do something that scares us the more we can start getting beyond that fight or flight mentality and start clicking off our severe inner critic, so that we really can start learning from the experience and improving

Both of us feel our experiences helped open other possible doors and allowed us to consider opportunities that we likely wouldn’t have taken without having first made this commitment to try new things.

Towards the end of this conversation, we talk about noticing and honoring our desire to do something. How it can be helpful to take off all the pressure of expectation, and just allow something to be what it is. Even if we don’t feel 100% ready, we can give ourselves the opportunity to try – encouraging a sense of experimentation and play and reminding ourselves that there is value in the process and not just in the outcome or the quality of performance.

We also remind each other that we first got into podcasting from a desire to gain experience talking about our work and the writing craft, and that those first episodes were scary and intimidating. It took time to get to the place where we could objectively listen to what we’d created and start to figure out and refine our process.

We hope you enjoy this conversation. Thanks for joining us here in this space! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore read a famous quote at the beginning of the episode that’s attributed to Joseph Campbell. Here are those words:

  • The cave you fear to enter hold the treasure you seek.

We also mention a connected quote from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. That quote is:

  • As you think about your own path to daring leadership, remember Joseph Campbell's wisdom: "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." Own the fear, find the cave, and write a new ending for yourself, for the people you're meant to serve and support, and for your culture. Choose courage over comfort. Choose whole hearts over armor. And choose the great adventure of being brave and afraid - at the same time.

We also share a quote from Shonda Rhime’s book Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person. Those words are as follows:

  • Every “yes” changes something in me. Every “yes” is a bit more transformative. Every “yes” sparks some new phase of revolution.

The Verbivore talks a little about fear and excitement feeling similar, and re-framing fear as excitement. This is known in the scientific community as anxiety reappraisal, and studies have supported that individual performance in a task improves when we tell ourselves “I am excited” rather than “I am affraid”. The Ted Talk “You Are Contagious” by Vanessa Van Edwards discusses this study starting at timestamp 16:32.

Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:

Books and Films Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)