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July 12, 2013
How to put your fear aside
Michelle Ray’s new book is about how to make change in life.
LAUREN KRAMER
Vancouverite Michelle Ray knows all about the emotional and personal price people pay when they stay in a situation that consistently makes them miserable. Over the course of her life, she has experienced that misery firsthand. She wanted a different outcome for herself, however, and made it happen by creating change in her life. Now she’s trying to help a broader audience of readers get un-stuck from their own misery.
“The message in my book is about being a leader of one’s life,” she told the Jewish Independent in a recent interview about Lead Yourself First! Breakthrough Strategies to Live the Life You Want (Red Carpet Publications, 2013). “We have exposure to so many negative messages that we’ve lost the ability to innovate. We allow ourselves to be influenced by the doom and gloom, such as the market will crash, and the economy is unstable. What I hope people get out of my book is that each one of us can make the choice to take the lead, rather than letting other people define who we are supposed to be.”
Ray moved from Australia to Vancouver two decades ago and has been a self-employed public speaker for most of that time. Previously, she had held various positions in sales, many of them high-pressure jobs with long hours and difficult relationships with her bosses. A career is not enough to fulfil a person, she learned. “And when the leadership isn’t fulfilling you either, I just couldn’t stand by and be miserable,” she said. “I didn’t want to live like that.”
In her public-speaking career, Ray said she is continuously approached by members of the audience who feel frustrated with their lives, their co-workers or their jobs. With Lead Yourself First!, she hopes to have an impact on even more people.
“I wrote the book because I believe there are many people who feel the way I have felt about business, work and life,” she said. “Particularly in the economy we’re in, many people want to create change but feel afraid, stuck and helpless.”
We tend to use fear to justify all the reasons for maintaining the status quo, she explained. “I’ve been there, and I know it’s a very painful place to be, because you’re frozen with fear and anxiety and you can’t make any change. I know many people crave a different outcome for themselves, but don’t know how to take that first step. This book is full of ideas on how to do that.”
Lead Yourself First! consists of short chapters, each one containing anecdotes from Ray’s life and the lives of other people she knows who can provide “everyman” examples. In each section, she poses challenges to readers, encouraging them to write down their thoughts, and providing space in the book to record them. For example, in the chapter discussing disappointment, Ray explains that the lens you use to view disappointment manifests a particular outcome: “If you say, ‘This always happens to me,’ instead of ‘Why is this happening to me?’ then perhaps you can learn to say only ‘Why is this happening?’ My belief is that there’s a lesson in the disappointment, perhaps an opportunity in that situation.”
The anecdotes are engaging and easy to identify with. That’s because we all tend to feel the same way, Ray said. It’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others. “Show me one person who has just got it all together,” she challenged. “I don’t believe it. It’s a façade.”
Ray recalled one boss who told her flatly that she didn’t have what it takes to succeed. “I was so affronted by that comment and didn’t think very much of that person for saying it,” she shared. “Within a few short years, I was in a very different role, responsible for the media sales for 23 radio stations in Australia. You could say I proved him wrong!”
The inspiration for this former Aussie is her parents, both of them Holocaust survivors who, she said, exemplified resilience and courage. “My father lost his businesses many times, was unemployed, lost our home in a recession, and yet he was the eternal optimist. When you’ve been exposed to a person like that, you can’t forget it. Sitting around the kitchen table and working in my parents’ businesses was better than any business school I could have gone to.”
From the practical advice and the personal challenges suggested in Lead Yourself First!, it’s easy to believe that Ray has all the answers, but the truth is different, she admitted. “I still have to remind myself of my own message and dig deep sometimes,” she confessed. “For example, I have to make business decisions and accept things that don’t always pan out. We’re all confronted with the concept of being the leader of ourselves no matter what our position or how much success we’ve had.”
Since publishing Lead Yourself First!, Ray said that many new doors of opportunity have opened for her, as she’s garnered publicity across the country. That positive media has helped sell the book and generated a great deal of momentum. “I’m starting to contemplate the next book, but I don’t quite know what format that will take as yet,” she said.
Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.
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