In PHQP 0017 Do The Scary Thing, Jeff explores the value of embracing fear to foster growth, sharing his experience of aiding a stranded dolphin and completing a grueling 50-mile walk. He discusses how doing the scary thing—whether big or small—sparks joy, builds resilience, and prevents stagnation, encouraging listeners to face their fears with intention and preparation.

Watch Now: PHQP_0017 Do The Scary Thing

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So I’m basically a marine biologist now. This episode we’re gonna get into talking about doing the scary thing and why that’s important. And I had a chance to do a mildly scary thing yesterday, meaning new to me.

I’d never done it before. And I think first time things kind of always fall under the scary thing category for us. And so I’m walking on the beach.

It’s just before sun up. And I see up ahead of me something along the shore, just kind of right there at the water’s edge. And get a little bit closer and I realize it is a dolphin.

And I think, okay, dead dolphin on the beach. I gotta call the turtle dolphin hotline and report it. And reach for my phone to start to do that.

And then the dead dolphin splishes and splashes a little bit. And I thought, oh shit, this is not a dead dolphin. This is a live dolphin.

See that marine biologist part. See, I can tell the difference between alive and dead. And this is kind of a bigger thing.

And so I get the hotline person. I’ve got a call person that answers in off hours. And she says, oh wow, well let me get a hold of my direct supervisor and can you stay there for a while and help sort this out? I’m like, yeah, sure, I’ve got no place else to be.

And so she messaged with her boss. She wants me to send her pictures and videos. And this dolphin, every minute or so, it’s thrashing a little bit.

And then she’s like, okay, my boss is on the way. She’s about 20 minutes away. And the rest of the team is gonna be there.

Can you wade into the water and try to flip the dolphin upright, so it’s kind of on its side, flip it upright so this blowhole is out of the water so that it can breathe. So this blowhole’s out of the sand. I’m like, yeah, I can do that.

She’s like, be careful, it might thrash around and they’ve got very strong tails. I’m like, okay. And so I flip my shoes off and I wade out into the water and I get the thing flipped up on its side and I gotta hold it there with my leg to keep it from tipping back over again.

So I’m holding it there and splashing water on it and saying, there, there, it’ll be okay. Because I didn’t know what else to say to the dolphin. And then the phone girl, she texts me back.

She says, can you keep track of its breaths? And so I’m holding the dolphin up and keeping track of how many times it’s breathing in a minute. And this goes on for about 30 minutes. And then the first response person shows up and she takes over.

Look, dolphin probably died. I haven’t heard back from them yet. They have very, very low survival rates when something like this happens.

But it was a thing, a chance to do a little bit of scary thing because I’d never held a dolphin upright and counted its breaths before. So there’s that. Early learning guy and marine biologist.

It’s a cute little blowhole. I’d be really happy if a little dolphin lived. Anyway, on with our one and only topic for this episode, doing the scary thing.

Last episode, I mentioned that I was heading off on my 50 mile walk and I did that. I left about 4 p.m. in the afternoon and walked 25 miles in one direction basically and turned around and walked back and arrived home at 11-ish the next morning. So 50 miles in about 20 hours.

And it was delightful mostly. I did the right planning mostly. My feet were hamburger.

And I had anticipated needing some downtime after this endeavor for foot recovery. But it was worse than I anticipated it was gonna be because no matter how much you plan, things don’t always go as planned. And anyway, it was a great experience.

I’m glad I did it. Now I don’t have to live with wondering. I wonder if I could have or I wish I would have.

And that’s one thing about the scary thing. Scary things can be big, adventurous kind of things like that. But scary things can also be saying no to somebody when they ask you to do something that you really, really, really don’t wanna do.

Or taking that first step towards changing jobs or going back to school. Or if you’re a child, the scary thing might be a first step or a first trip down the slide. Some scary things I’ve talked about in the past.

Our examples are I met a family childcare provider who wanted to, as an adult, wanted to learn how to ride a bike so that she could ride with her daughter. And then she did that. She taught herself to ride a bike.

My wife, Tasha, has done a couple that I’m really impressed by. Jumping off of like a 20-some foot high pier in Australia. Splish into the water.

And she is not the pier jumping type. At least she wasn’t when she did it. And the smile on her face afterwards is something that’s burned into my memory.

For me, it’s public speaking. I talk about this in trainings. And in high school, I literally couldn’t get up and do that little 30-second presentation that you have to do in front of the class with your index cards.

And then one day I sucked it up and volunteered to present at a conference. And that turned into a couple decades of getting to travel all over the U.S. and Canada and Australia and meet amazing people and talk about topics I’m passionate about. And it would’ve never happened if I hadn’t done that scary thing.

And so this episode, we’re gonna dig into why that’s important. First off is when I talk about doing the scary thing, I’m not talking about putting yourself in a very hazardous situation. One of the things you wanna do when you’re preparing to do your scary thing, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about all next episode, is to reduce danger with hazard mitigation.

Next episode, we’re gonna talk about the planning I did to reduce the danger of that 50-mile walk I did. Because I think that’ll be illustrative of what you can do when you’re planning to take risk and help kids do the scary thing in your early learning environment or in your own life. So first, we’re not talking about just blindly jumping off of bridges, not that kind of scary thing.

We’re talking about doing something that you’re interested in doing, something that you wanna do, and making it safe for yourself to do that. So that’s where the hazard mitigation piece comes in. And again, we’ll talk about that more next episode.

The reason we should do the scary thing is because doing is greater than dreaming. And so I could’ve not done this big, stupid walk that I did, but I always would’ve had this in the back of my head, there would’ve always been a what if I had. Now I’ve got it checked off my list.

And that’s a beneficial thing, because a lot of times we spend time dreaming and having goals and wishing we would do things without actually stepping up and facing the uncomfortableness of doing that thing. And so doing is greater than dreaming is why we should do the scary thing. We also should see fear as a guide, not a barrier.

A lot of times that fear we feel when we contemplate doing the scary thing becomes a roadblock. And okay, this scares me, so I’m not gonna do it. Instead of that, we should maybe look as that feeling of discomfort as a guide.

This is a thing that makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable, but also I see how it would be beneficial. How can I work through that discomfort to get to the beneficial side on the other end of things? And that shifted mindset might make it a little bit easier for you to do your scary thing. Doing the scary thing now and then prevents stagnation.

We kind of get comfortable in our daily routines, maybe daily ruts if one day is so much like the day before. And that can make life boring. And look, life is too short to be boring.

One of the best things I’ve done personally for me to prevent stagnation is four or five years ago now, I started strength training. And little by little by little, pound, half pound at a time, I’m adding weight to my barbell and a bunch of different lifts. And I see that progress as an old dude, and it feels good.

And now, look, I’m never gonna be super strong, but I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been in my life. At 56, I’m stronger than I was at 16 or 26. And that feels good.

So doing the scary thing prevents stagnation. Doing the scary thing can also spark fulfillment and joy. Because I gotta tell you, this 50 mile walk, it was grueling.

The first 35 miles, not actually so bad. The next 10 miles from mile 35 to 45 were painful and uncomfortable. The last five miles were torturous.

I wanted to give up. But then I took that last step and I opened the door and I was home and I felt fulfilled and I felt happy. I feel the same thing when I get up from under the barbell.

I feel like I did a good thing. I have that feeling of joy and fulfillment. I felt the same thing walking away from the dolphin yesterday.

Now, look, the dolphin probably died. I’ll give you an update if I ever hear back from them. But I did a thing and we tried and that feels good.

And so kids are this way. After that first step, after the first trip down the slide, after the first time they use their words to get back the green shovel when they’re having a dispute with somebody in the sandbox. All those things are moments of fulfillment and joy that would have been missed if they hadn’t taken the opportunity to do that scary thing.

Another benefit of doing the scary thing is it increases resilience. You kind of know where your edge is as well. You become more able to survive and thrive in the world.

You build, I guess, grit is a word a lot of people use. And that’s good, that’s beneficial. That makes us more rounded and fulfilled human beings.

Yeah, I didn’t close the blinds and I can see what’s going on outside of the corner of my eye and it’s annoying me and I should have closed the blinds. We’ll do that next time. I should have edited that out, I’m not going to.

So it increases resilience. That’s a valuable thing for us and kids. We become, like a piece of this, kind of adjacent to this, is we become better risk assessors because the reason the scary things are scary is because they involve risk taking.

And if you look back at a previous episode when we talked about risk, we take, there’s four types of risk. Social risk, emotional risk, cognitive risk, and physical risks. And most scary things that we put off or dive into are scary because they involve one of those four types of risk.

And as we do more scary things, we become better assessors of risk, better deciders of what risks we can handle and what risks we aren’t ready for. And then the whole mitigation piece that I’ve mentioned before. Also, if things don’t turn out, failure fuels growth.

There was a, I gave myself an 80% chance of finishing that walk. I would have liked to think it was higher than that, but realistically, that’s probably where I was. And so there’s a chance I wasn’t gonna make it.

There’s a chance my knee could give out. There’s a chance I could get stomach flu, food poisoning, halfway through, I need to quit. There’s all kinds of, I mean, the weather could have turned and turned into something I didn’t wanna be out in.

There’s all kinds of things that could have led to failure. But even when you try the scary thing and it doesn’t go quite as expected, with something you would label as a failure, there’s always valuable information you can take from there for the next scary thing you do or for a future attempt at the thing that didn’t quite go right the first time. So even when things go wrong, there’s benefits.

And again, we gotta take that hazard mitigation piece and there we’re not randomly jumping off of bridges. We’re thinking about which bridges we’re gonna jump off of. So that’s 13 or 14 minutes of that topic.

And so get out there, do your scary thing. Wrapping up, I’d love to hear about your scary things, scary things that you’ve done, scary things that you’re contemplating, scary things are still maybe a little bit too scary for you to dive in. My contact information is in the show notes.

Amazon idea for this month, just look, somebody using my Amazon link, which is in the show notes, bought themselves some new lawn chairs, some of these zero gravity lounge chair recliners with pillow and cup holder trays. They got the burgundy. I think we would have gotten this kind of a bluish tealish kind of down there.

I think that’s what Tasha would like if we want some new lawn chairs. So look, somebody spent 100 bucks on those. And because they spent that 100 bucks, the Playvolution HQ site got a couple bucks out of that.

Doesn’t increase their price, but that’s just kind of an advertising thing Amazon does that helps support the show, helps keep the servers running for the podcast and the Playvolution HQ website. So shop that link if you wanna support the show. Next up, share things if you like them.

If you like this podcast, if you like things over at Playvolution HQ, share them. That’s how the site grows. And it’s greatly appreciated when you do those things.

Next week, like I said, we’re gonna talk more about hazard mitigation. It’s come up in a couple episodes and we’re gonna go through kind of the planning I did, the hazard mitigating I did to prepare for that 50 mile walk as a illustration of some things you can consider, some ways you can go about mitigating hazards when you’re dealing with things in your settings. Finally, dad joke of the week.

Well, I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes. So she gave me a hug. That could not be more true.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. Back soon with another episode.

Goodbye. This has been an Explorations Early Learning Upstairs Studio production. Thank you.

Did that go okay, Jeeves?

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