The Men’s Group: Snippet #3
“Darcy [the protagonist] was a thinker and constantly lived in his head. During any new situations, he scrolled through all the terrible outcomes that could manifest, rarely concentrating on the potentially positive. This kind of thinking paralyzed him. He would often delay for days before making a big decision, oftentimes waiting until outside forces forced him to make one choice or the other. He feared, above all, making the wrong choice. Darcy always wanted his choices to lead him along the right path.” - The Men’s Group, Draft One (2017)
Do you see yourself in Darcy? What do you do when you find yourself catastrophizing rather than focusing on the positives that could emerge? Where does fear of making the wrong choice get in your way?
When Coach Nick and I started writing the book, A LOT of me ended up in Darcy. Not all of me, but he’s always contained a large portion of my character within him. In fact, I often used writing the book as an opportunity to explore the challenges I encountered in my own life. Each draft has seen explorations of different relationships and helped me break through that now-not-quite-as-present fear of making the wrong choice. But, it’s still a paralysis I often face.
I remember years ago walking back and forth in the cookbook section of Barnes and Noble when there was still a location on Lexington Avenue. It was 2015 and I was looking to buy a friend a cookbook for his birthday. I must’ve wandered back and forth in that section 15 or 20 times, picking up a book here and there and trying to narrow down my selection. Eventually, I ended up buying him the Momofuku cookbook, but that’s not why this story is impactful.
As I wandered the stacks, I noticed a slim volume that didn’t belong. I had recently finished reading The Artist’s Way and was more attuned to the synchronicities that I often missed before. I picked up the book. It was called The Gift of Maybe. I’ve never been a big fan of self-help books, but when I read the flap of this one and it talked about the author’s “addiction to certainty” I decided to buy it.
Like Darcy, I used to think of all the terrible outcomes that would happen with any choice I made. Rarely did I focus on the potentially positive. Having read Brené Brown’s work, I’ve learned that this is actually a way of hiding from vulnerability and protecting myself. If I don’t think about the good stuff that could happen, I’m not going to be as crushed when it doesn’t. The issue is that it led me to weigh everything; to always be overthinking my choices rather than making them and cleaning up whatever messes (beautiful or ugly) got created.
The Gift of Maybe offered a simple reframe: Maybe things will turn out the way I want; maybe they won’t; maybe they’ll end up being entirely different. Maybe creates the space for possibility and risk. An addiction to certainty, which I’ve experienced in my life, gets squarely in the way of making any choices containing unknowns. I’ve worked past that. Now, if only Darcy had read that book too.