Molly Graham

To get good at jumping off cliffs, you have to get good at three things.

The first is actually jumping off the cliff.

After many years of coaching people through career decisions, I know that sometimes it is just not the right time to take a risk.

But I can also tell you that most people do not stay stuck on the stairs out of necessity.

They stay there out of fear.

The trick is to learn to tell the difference between the kind of fear that says, I'm scared I might run out of money, which you should actually listen to, and the kind of fear that says, I'm scared I might fail, which you should take as a giant green flashing light to jump.

Cliff jumps teach you what you are capable of in spite of fear.

The second thing you have to get good at in order to get good at jumping off cliffs is surviving the fall.

Jumping off a cliff is taking a giant step backwards into the land of being a beginner again.

That means it's a very big learning process, and with that comes a huge emotional roller coaster.

daily, weekly, sometimes hourly.

All of my jumps have involved vacillating wildly between feeling like, oh, maybe I'm going to be good at this, and then immediately feeling like, who the hell even gave me this job in the first place?

All of that is normal, and it doesn't actually mean that anything is wrong.

You have to learn to expect the roller coaster and ignore it at the same time.

The most valuable mantra for me in this phase has been, give it two weeks.

A lot of people will tell you to sleep on it.

I can tell you most of these emotions don't go away overnight.

Two weeks is a great barometer for things that you should actually pay attention to.

The third thing you have to get good at in order to get good at jumping off cliffs is becoming a professional idiot.

I can tell you that this is one of my greatest strengths.