Don't let fear undermine dreams, plans, and hopes

by Kathleen Martin

So I went to The Oprah Show. Having grown up near Chicago, whether or not I've seen Oprah is one of the first questions people ask me. And now I have, and I can tell you it was a lovely experience.

After the show my mother and I meandered up Michigan Avenue heading for the perfect topper: Ethel's Chocolate Lounge, a self-proclaimed "place to chocolate and chat." It's on one of the most famous shopping streets in America, in the heart of Chicago's Gold Coast. Rather, it was. Closed. Just a month ago. And, said the security guard, the loss of Ethel's was only one among many.

"It's dead here now," he told us, waving his hand toward Bloomingdale's, awash in sale signs. "Has been since before Christmas."

It felt like all of Chicago was on sale, and this was eerie, even for a devoted bargain lover. I wanted things not to be on sale, because that would feel normal. Throughout the city, everyone-from small business owners to a wealthy lawyer who runs in the same circles as Oprah herself-is scared. In talking to these people, I was suddenly aware of the on-the-ground enormity of the recession in the United States, the desperation of it. We have been comparatively shielded here.

The best time to invest, to start a new business, is to step bravely out into a recession. Buy while stock prices are low. Snap up opportunities during the down part of the cycle. But, dear God, how nerve-wracking.

Unless you're Jenny Scott, president of Stylin' Mama, Baby & Tot. Scott opened her first retail store ("Everything you need from pre-natal to pre-school") a year-and-a-half ago in Saint John, N.B. She opened another in Fredericton in March and has plans for a third as-yet-undecided location next year. Plus, she has a booming online business. "If I want to do something, I jump in with both feet," says Scott. "I've got confidence in what I do and usually don't second-guess myself."

It's not just gumption that finds Scott starting new businesses in the midst of a tricky economy. She's calculating too. "People will cut back on certain things in a recession, but they won't cut back on their kids," she says. "Women are always going to be pregnant, people always want children, regardless of the economy. This is an industry that is booming."

Scott, who has three children, the oldest of whom is three-and-a-half, started thinking about the business when she was pregnant with her first. "I realized that you could still be sexy when you're pregnant, have nice maternity clothes, and get funky strollers that aren't huge and ugly and plaid. You could get those things. You just couldn't get them in New Brunswick."

Where does courage come from? How is it possible, like Scott, to jump two-footed during a time of stomach-dropping economic anxiety? And how can we increase our tolerance for risk enough to let ourselves be creative?

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the international bestseller Eat Pray Love, spoke about this at a recent TED Conference in California. How, she wondered, would she contend with trying to write again in the wake of the "freakish success" of her latest book?

"Everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed," she said. "Aren't you afraid that you're going to keep writing for your whole life and never again create a book that anyone in the whole word cares about at all ever, ever again?" She's concerned with how we as a society frame success, and how fear affects creative performance.

Gilbert suggests we look at how creative genius was understood before the Renaissance: as something that exists outside the individual. This creative genius is on loan to you unpredictably from time to time-if you show up and keep trying to do what it is you are here to do. "Don't be afraid," she says. "Don't be daunted. Just do your job."

If you can do that, if you can focus not on the crashing around us but on what your job is-what you are best at-just maybe genius will keep in touch.

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.