On Becoming Fearless … in Love, Work and Life

This morn­ing, Peter Guber, in The Har­vard Busi­ness Review, reminds us of the power of story telling in Using Sto­ries to Over­come Fear. Do you want to hear a beau­ti­ful story, that will inspire you to become fearless?

Lis­ten to Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton at Women@Google, inter­viewed by a very blos­som­ing Sheryl Sand­berg, then in a very advanced stage of pregnancy.

“I left Greece when I was 18 to go to Cam­bridge where I stud­ied Eco­nom­ics. I saw a mag­a­zine arti­cle about Cam­bridge when I lived in Athens in a one-room appart­ment with my mom, divorced from my father, with no for­mal edu­ca­tion. I looked at that pic­ture and I said “I want to go to Cam­bridge.” Every­body said you’re insane. My mother said “Let’s see how we can do it.” And that is the mother that I had. She was this extra­or­di­nary human bee­ing who believed that you should never let your fears stop you from attempt­ing to ful­fill your dreams. If you failed, that didn’t mat­ter. If I failed along the way, she wouldn’t love me any less. And so that kind of uncon­di­tional lov­ing is the foun­da­tion of my life.”

Isn’t it a beau­ti­ful story of mother and daugh­ter, of  their uncon­di­tional love, of men­tor and empowerment?

All the ingre­di­ents of a fairy tale are there, just like in Ursula Burns’s story

The ini­tial sit­u­a­tion the lit­tle girl in a one-room appart­ment in Athens, with her divorced mother (who had tuberculosis…)

The obsta­cles: gen­der, class, cul­ture, lan­guage, finances

The val­ues of a pure heart: Hard work, per­se­ver­ance, uncon­di­tional love

The Fairy God Mother: her own mother, Elli Stassinopou­los.

The Edu­ca­tion of the Hero : Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton grad­u­ated in eco­nom­ics from Gir­ton Col­lege, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity. She became the pres­i­dent of the Cam­bridge debate team.

The First Tri­als : she failed many times, but she remem­bers, dur­ing an inter­view by Moira Forbes, her biggest failure.It was when her sec­ond book was refused 36 times and she was run­ning out of money. “The only way to make sure you never suc­ceed is to stay in your com­fort zone and never fail. The dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and fail­ure is perseverance.”

The Mag­i­cal Potion: she is fear­less! Noth­ing can stop her, she never gives up! (another mag­i­cal potion ele­ment is sleep too…)

The Help­ful “Ani­mals”: that’s what she calls the sup­port­ive peo­ple that the “uni­verse” sent her. (like the Barclay’s bank man­ager in Lon­don who gave her an overdraft)

The Happy End­ing : Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton has become today the most pow­er­ful woman in media history.

The power of a story is that it gives each of us the per­mis­sion to dream and the keys to make that dream come true. It engages us and trans­ports us, mind, body & soul all together. Sto­ries plug directly into our uncon­scious and our emo­tions and are res­onat­ing indi­vid­u­ally for each of us, in a unique manner.

That’s why they are almost “mag­i­cal”… and cer­tainly a major skill any global leader should develop.

Today I intended to write a post about Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton, in my series about 12 Women Lead­ers, to illus­trate the Networker/Monitor dilemna.

As I researched the web for some arti­cles and videos, I quickly under­stood that Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton was mak­ing the head­lines with the merger with AOL.

“I guess that makes this AOL’s — and HuffPost’s — Sput­nik Moment!”  Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton, Feb­ru­ary 7th 2011 at The Huff­in­g­ton Post

I can’t wait to write the next post devel­op­ing The Net­worker Style of Lead­er­ship, char­ac­ter­ized by social inter­ac­tions, net­work­ing and hedo­nism, in oppo­si­tion with The Mon­i­tor, focused on hard work, self-discipline and per­se­ver­ance. Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton def­i­nitely mas­ters the art of jug­gling with para­dox and dilemna!

A very timely illus­tra­tion to what Umair Haque calls The Age of Dilemna…

But this is another story!

Which sto­ries are help­ing you over­come fear and become “fear­less” in Love, Work and Life?

If you want to read another inspir­ing story, here’s Ursula Burns ‘s Fairy Tale Story in The Cor­po­rate World.

Big Mama Mar­ion will come back with some other sto­ries very soon!

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