TAKE ME AS I AM

How can we have more confidence in the face of uncertainty?

“My tattoos aren’t because I’m part of any gang,” Ben tells me. “At fourteen, it felt cool to get a tattoo. Most of ‘em are pretty stupid. The only one that makes any sense is this one I got about six months ago that says ‘Believe.’ Because nothin’s possible if you don’t believe…”

As Ben drives me around Napa Valley so I can find a campsite for the night while my car’s tires are aligned at Big O, he talks about his life. How tonight, when he returns home, he will learn whether he passed the test to become a police officer. If not, he will need to try again.

Ben is now 20 and says he doesn’t like dating much. Most of the people his age feel so young. He’s never had a drink or tried a drug. He plays softball two nights a week. That’s his inexpensive fun. Otherwise, he works at Big O Tires and moves toward his dream of becoming a police officer.

When I ask about peer pressure to drink or do drugs, he says, “I think peer pressure’s overrated. We have choices.”

         He tells me his parents split when he was 15. He lived with his mom until he had a bad argument with his mom’s new boyfriend. His mom left Ben. He lived in a trailer on his own. He quit school to support himself. He had no car. Walked to work daily. Spent a lot of introspective nights alone in his trailer.

Friends said, “Oh, I’m so jealous, to have all of that freedom….” Ben said, “Are you kidding? I’d love to have rules. I’d love to have people mad because I was coming home too late.”

I ask about his tattoo in Chinese that says, “I love Anna.” Anna is his mother’s name.

He tells me, “No matter what, you always love your mama.”

I think how easy it would have been for Ben to have gone the other way – to choose drinking, drugs, violence or gangs.

What keeps him moving in the right direction? What keeps any of us moving in the right direction when we have no clear map?

Ben tells me that a college professor came into Big O Tires some time ago. He talked about making choices, saying, “You can choose how you want to respond if someone cuts you off in traffic…”

Ben confesses that he’d had anger issues in the past. “This man put words to what I’d always felt.”

When I see Ben a few days later, I ask about his test results. “I bombed,” he answers. “I didn’t think I’d passed. That was one of the problems of leaving school. My vocabulary’s not good and my spelling’s horrible.”

That afternoon, though, Ben borrowed his first book –from his mom: “Every word I don’t understand I’m going to write it down and look it up –to build my vocabulary.”

When I mention his desire to become a police officer, he says, “No. I am going to be a police officer. It just may take some time.”

I understand now that for Ben –and many of us –freedom is about taking a stand on who you want to be, even when your only compass for a while may be who you don’t want to be.

When I ask Ben for his email address, he smiles and says, “You’re going to like this:

It’s takemeasiam…”

How can we all gain greater confidence from Ben’s story?

1. Believe in yourself and in your dream, even if your only compass for a while may be in knowing who you don’t want to be.
2. Let go of feelings such as, Aren’t I beyond navigating based on what I don’t want to be? Aren’t I further along on my path? Yes, you may be. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t all slip off occasionally. The key is to know how to find our way back, quickly. Reclaiming the compass of how we don’t want to be provides inner navigation.
3. Celebrate small steps. You created a positive habit for every time you haven’t succeeded yet, like Ben did in committing to look up every word he did not know? Honor that.

By the way, I caught up with Ben years later: He had become a police officer, as well as a proud husband and father.

Jillian Robinson is a Certified High Performance Coach whose passion is to help people live their best selves with the consistentfeelings of full engagement, joy and confidence. She loves to interview and coach changemakers and parents committed to positively impact young peoples’ lives. Her vision is that, someday, personal development will be taught as commonly as math and science. When you participate in her programs, you become part of that positive change.