Protection Rackets
I have a meeting with the CEO in thirty minutes. It's just a check-in, but I'm anxious. I've been up all night. It feels like a gremlin is on my chest, telling me that I'm about to be found out. He will notice that I'm not good enough to do this work.
This is a little sad, but I keep this anxiety around on purpose. Not usually consciously. But part of me believes the anxiety is what drives me to do good work. That if I wasn't so terrified all the time, I'd become lazy, careless, unworthy.
But that little gremlin makes it impossible to do good work. It makes me look, on the outside, lazy, careless, unworthy.
This is a protection racket.
Somewhere early in my childhood, I made a deal with myself. The deal goes like this: if I stay vigilant, nobody will discover the truth about me.
The logic looks like this:
Fear → Extra Effort → Good outcome → Gold Star! → Permission to feel okay about myself.
If you've been fundraising for more than a few years, you've probably seen this cycle in yourself or in others. It's not uncommon.
Anxiety-driven fundraising is so brittle. It means that I'm always performing like a trained monkey - looking for approval, not actually listening. I can't be present with real concerns without judging them, because I'm too busy managing perceptions.
If you're running the protection racket you can't have a peer relationship with a boss, a board, or a donor. Every conversation becomes a prove-yourself report-out. You're always auditioning.
In a perfect world, what I do in the meeting is my task. What my boss thinks of me is their task. The protection racket collapses the two together so you're always doing both, and doing neither well.
And of course, my battery gets low quickly working this way. Managing anxiety is energy I don't have for courageous thinking. I show up depleted. Like I'm about to do in thirty minutes.
Fundraisers seem are uniquely susceptible to the protection racket because the work looks like it should be driven by external validation.
You are, literally, asking people to affirm your organization's value (and your value) with their money. The feedback loop is built into the job description. Every gift you close whispers: See? You're good enough. Every declined ask whispers: See? You're not. More importantly, the weight of the potential declines makes it so even waking up and sending an email to a donor is exhausting.
If my sense of self-worth is entangled with your close rate, I will eventually burn out or become manipulative. This the inevitable downstream effect a profession that validates my protection racket.
Being proud of myself is hard in situations like these. And as long as my internal self-assessment defaults to not enough, anxiety is my default response to being seen.
Attempting to drop it
How to act fully in the world without being enslaved by my need for the world's approval?
When anxiety arises before a meeting, notice that two things are happening simultaneously. There's the raw physical sensation — the tightness, the heat, the contraction. And then there's the story my mind attaches to it: I'm going to be found out. They'll see I'm not enough.
Advice to myself: The sensation is just sensation. It doesn't mean anything. The story is where the racket lives. Look directly at the emotion, not the story. Anxiety without the narrative doesn't have the solidity you thought it had. It's energy in your body. It moves. It changes.
A soul full of its own self-concern has no room for anything else. In the racket, I'm pre-scripting narratives. A meeting I've already filled with my need for a particular outcome has no room for genuine connection. I'm performing at the donor, not playing a game with the donor.
Whatever emotion I'm trying to avoid, I am creating it in exactly the way I'm trying to avoid it. By trying to avoid feeling not-good-enough, I build a life of constant performance and self-monitoring — which is the experience of not being good enough.
My successful meetings, my gifts closed, the relationships I built. Were those the product of my anxiety or my skill? The racket takes credit for all of it. But it didn't do any of it.
What good is a perfect case statement if the person delivering it is terrified of the silence after the ask? What good is a donor strategy if the fundraiser can't sit with a "no" without it confirming their worst fear about themselves?
The inner work is the professional work.
Dropping the protection racket requires is repeated experiences of being seen — including being seen falling short — and discovering that I'm still standing afterward. I'm looking for opportunities to practice this. It's extremely uncomfortable.
But my peeks at awareness tell me that my empty vessel is available. My anxiety is already free. My emotion transforms when I welcome it. I just need to stop holding on.
The meeting is in fifteen minutes now. See you on the other side.