Madness ensued, as Travis and I dropped to all fours and unleashed our best dog-chasing-cat act. I barked and growled and pursued. Travis hissed and scampered and threatened me with fake claws. We did this for a minute or two, in a room of 30 people.

And then it was my turn to be master.

CGW4

Last month I attended Steve Pavlina’s fourth Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas. All in all, it was one of the best weekends I ever had, as I got to meet a bunch of exceptional people and learn lots about myself.

The scene described above happened during the first day of the workshop. Steve had the attendees divide into groups of three, and each person took a turn being the master while the other two acted as servants. As servants, we were allowed to refuse an order if it made us feel uncomfortable.

The goal of the exercise was to discover which role we were more comfortable in. Some people had no problem taking orders and preferred not to be in charge, while other folks reveled in their role as master, really enjoying the feelings of power and control.

We actually did the exercise twice, taking about 15 minutes each time. During the first round, the masters mostly instructed their servants to do silly things, like have a dance-off, poke other people in the room or pretend snow ball fight. Afterwards, Steve sat everybody down for a few minutes and had us reflect. We were asked to recognize where our hesitations were, and consider how we could be better masters and servants when called upon.

Then we started into the second round.

What I learned

The master/servant exercise was one of the highlights of the workshop for me. I learned a lot from it. Three primary lessons:

1. Go your own way

For my first turn as master, I fell in with the crowd and got my servants to do silly, trivial things. It was only during the break that I asked myself what I really wanted them to do. This is something I — and I believe most people — often struggle with. It’s easy to just do what everyone else is doing and not question it. It takes a lot of courage and consciousness to decide your own course of action — the course of action that feels most true to you — and follow it.

2. Push people

During the first round, I realized that I was only giving my servants tasks that I knew they would do, tasks they wouldn’t object to. I didn’t try to push them out of their comfort zone. This comes down to an irrational fear I have of rejection, and a weird double standard I have in my head. See, I love it when others push me, but for some reason I hesitate to push others and expect much less from them than I do from myself. Having realized this, I was more assertive and pushed my servants a bit more during the second round, and I know we all got a lot more from the session because of that.

3. Ask to be pushed

When considering how i could be a better servant, I realized that I just patiently awaited an instruction during the first round of the exercise, and then carried it out. The tasks didn’t really push me out of my comfort zone. What if I asked my master to give me some harder tasks, tasks that would stretch me? In the second round, when Travis was master, I asked him to push me. So he did, asking me to take my shirt off in that room of 30 people, then go around asking everyone else to join me in shirtless rebellion. That was definitely out of my comfort zone, so I did it, and it wasn’t such a big deal. I found what Steve Pavlina had told us to be true: “Beyond fear, there’s lots and lots of fun.”

Are you more comfortable being the master or being a servant?

Ideally, you should be comfortable in both roles. There will always be times when you’ll be called upon to lead, and there will always be times when you’ll be called upon to follow. Becoming aware of your strengths and weaknesses in those roles now will help you perform better in the future.

I grew up in the Irish countryside with no sisters and very few neighbors, and I went to all-boys schools all the way up until college. So by the age of eighteen, I was terrified at the thought of talking to women. To me, women were these exotic creatures that spoke a completely different language and you couldn’t look directly at one you found attractive for fear of bursting into flames.

But I liked women all the same, and I wanted to know more about them.

My final year in secondary school, there was one woman in particular that fascinated me. I’d see her every day as d’Mudder drove me to school. We’d pass her at some point as she was walking over the Rice Bridge and up the hill, on her way to the all-girls school at the top of it. She was maybe a year younger than me at the time, had dark hair and looked more cute than sexy.

I called her Bridget, because she walked over the bridge every day.

Day after day and week after week I’d see this girl walking to school. I’d always sneak a look at her out of the car window. I started imagining what I’d say to her if I ever had the opportunity. How would I start the conversation? How would I keep it going? In my imagination, I was fantastically suave and charming, but the reality was that I always made an awful fool of myself when I tried to talk to girls, struggling to utter even one coherent sentence.

But I really liked this Bridget girl (based solely on the way she looked and the way she walked) so one day I up and decided I would overcome the terror of actually approaching a female of the species. I promised myself that the very next morning, I would join Bridget on her walk across the bridge and up the hill. I’d somehow manage to engage her in the best conversation of all time and she’d fall madly in love with me.

So, that very next morning, I got up early and spent about two hours in the bathroom making myself look the loveliest I’d ever looked. My eyebrows were near groomed to perfection by the time I was finished. I hurried d’Mudder so we’d leave a few minutes early and I’d be able to intercept Bridget at the bridge.

But disaster struck: Bridget was already crossing the bridge as we drove over it. It was a minute before I could get out of the car, muttering something to my mother about it being a lovely day for a walk, and then I was off in hot pursuit! As I rushed back over the bridge, I could see Bridget already making her way up the hill. I figured I had about ten minutes before she reached the school and my opportunity would be lost forever. Luckily, there was an old shortcut up the side of the hill, and I knew that I could run up that way and catch up with her.

So I did. I sprinted up the side of this hill like a madman, a bag full of school books in tow.

Now imagine the scene: I get up to the road, only to find that I’d run too fast, and I now had to stand there sweating and heaving for about a minute as Bridget walked up towards me. In her mind, she must have been thinking, “Oh my God! I hope this sweaty weirdo doesn’t try and talk to me!”

But talk to her I did. I turned to her as she came close and asked, “Do you mind if I walk with you?” She was a little stunned, but said okay. Maybe she was just afraid to say no, or maybe she was dazzled by my amazing eyebrows, I’m not sure. Regardless, there I was, walking up the hill with Bridget.

Happiness… for all of five seconds, after which I remembered I had to make conversation. I knew we didn’t have much time, so I thought I’d better impress upon this girl just how deep and sensitive a guy I was. So, noting the people sitting in their cars in traffic on the road, I asked Bridget, real mystically, “Do you ever wonder about the people in the cars? You know, what they’re thinking about as they’re sitting there? I mean, we look at them and form some quick judgment based on their appearance, but do they do the same of us? Are they thinking about what we’re thinking about? Do they realize that we’re wondering if they’re thinking about what we’re thinking about? You ever think about that?”

I believe her response was, “Uh… not really.”

I tried throwing a few more questions at her, but she just seemed to look at me a little more strangely each time as she quickened her pace. Two minutes later, we were at the gate of the school. And despite having just treated this girl to perhaps the worst conversation of her entire life, I somehow found the courage to ask her for her phone number. To which she replied, “Uh… I don’t think so.” With that, she turned on her heels and disappeared into the school, never to be seen by me again.

But I didn’t feel bad after that experience. On the contrary, I felt great about myself. Yeah, I’d gotten rejected, but I’d overcome a big chunk of that strange fear I had of women.

And that’s the moral of this story. It doesn’t much matter what happens when you face your fear, whether you emerge looking like a fool or a champ. The important thing is that you faced that fear in the first place. You stepped out of your comfort zone, maybe suffered some embarrassments, but discovered that the world keeps on spinning just the same.