Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action. She was a neurodiverse, introverted, middle-aged mom in the Midwest with no formal background in politics or activism, and yet she started one of the largest grassroots organizations in the country. Her organization passed hundreds of gun safety laws, stopped the gun industry’s agenda in statehouses 90 percent of the time, elected thousands of candidates who supported gun reform, and passed the first federal gun legislation in a generation. She has been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, a Forbes 50 Over 50 Changemaker, and a Glamour Woman of the Year. She is an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation’s leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office.
What’s the big idea?
When Shannon Watts started Moms Demand Action in 2012, she was struggling with ADHD, a debilitating fear of public speaking, and other seemingly insurmountable societal obstacles. Despite her myriad imperfections, she stepped up and persevered. During her journey, she figured out what she calls the fire formula. Following the fire formula causes an internal shift that gives you clarity on what’s limiting you and what’s calling you. In other words, finding what makes you come alive. Anyone can learn how to tap into this reservoir of untapped power and become a Firestarter, someone who chooses to prioritize their desires over their obligations. Living on fire might lead you to do extraordinarily ambitious things, but it also may compel you to finally act on ordinary things that are meaningful to you.
Below, Shannon shares five key insights from her new book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age. Listen to the audio version—read by Shannon herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. It’s not surprising that you don’t know what you want.
Society knows exactly what would happen if we were allowed or encouraged to want: The world would come undone. Without our mental and physical energy propping up the system, governments would fall, institutions would crumble, and traditional family systems would fall apart.
To ensure that doesn’t happen, society shoulders us with so many burdens and responsibilities—from work to housework to caregiving—that we have little to no room in our lives to explore our desires. As a result, we start to believe that if we haven’t yet realized our passion or talent, we must not have one. This phenomenon is referred to by Dr. Amy Diehl, a workplace gender bias expert, as “self-limited aspirations.” It’s what happens when we decide it’s not worth the drain on our energy, time, or mental health to take that next step forward.
“Society shoulders us with so many burdens and responsibilities—from work to housework to caregiving—that we have little to no room in our lives to explore our desires.”
But we don’t fear our fire because we’re weak; it’s because we’re wise. We know there’s a price to be paid for being someone who wants. We see all the obstacles—from gendered expectations to rigid social norms to economic pressures—and decide it’s easier and safer to stick with the status quo. We learn to keep our heads down and desires in check. The best way to unlearn that conditioning is to imagine what life would be like if the most important question you asked yourself was, “What do I want?”
2. There’s a formula you can follow to figure out what you want.
After my own journey, which included founding and leading Moms Demand Action, where I helped thousands of women transform feelings of hopelessness or powerlessness into feeling fired up in every aspect of their lives, I came to realize that there’s a formula everyone can follow to come alive, to build a life from the inside out, not the outside in. This formula is based on the three elements of the fire triangle, which represent the elements required to bring fire to life: heat, oxygen, and fuel. For your personal fire, those elements are your desires, values, and abilities.
Desire. Your desires are your deepest longings— the parts of you that yearn to be seen, make an impact, and be shared with the world. These are the longings that are ready to be acted on. Because your desires are the heat that activates your fire triangle, it’s the most powerful element among the three.
Values. Your values are your personal beliefs and principles that define your priorities, decisions, and actions. They are how you determine what is truly important to you in life. In your fire triangle, your values are the oxygen that feeds your desires.
Abilities. Your abilities are your unique mental or physical gifts, talents, and skills. They can be either innate or acquired, and they set you apart from everyone else. In your fire triangle, your abilities are the element that fuels your desires.
When these three elements are combined in the right way, just like in nature, you can ignite a fire in your life. This is the sweet spot where what you long for is aligned with the values that ground and guide you, as well as your gifts, talents, and skills. It’s an alchemy that can feel like magic.
3. When you go after what you want, you’ll get blowback.
Anyone who makes the conscious decision to live audaciously—to show up differently than they were before—will face blowback. Alarmed by your audaciousness, some will think, “How dare they?” Their reactions could come across as anger, rejection, disrespect, or ridicule. That blowback, in turn, is likely to engender feelings of guilt and shame in you.
I call these emotions extinguishers because they lead to damaging behaviors, including self-judgment, martyrdom, people-pleasing, and disappearing, all of which threaten to dampen your desire and put out your fire. These extinguishers can make you want to follow the criticism into the familiar, though painful, space of our negative inner voices. It’s the double gut punch of negative societal messages that we internalize as personal beliefs. During my conversations with dozens of Firestarters, I found that almost all of the women’s most common fear about pursuing their desires is that their children would resent the time and attention it would take away from them, turning them into a bad mother.
“It’s the double gut punch of negative societal messages that we internalize as personal beliefs.”
To survive this and other blowback you’ll inevitably face, you have to get comfortable making other people uncomfortable. Claiming your space, raising your voice, and choosing your desires over your perceived obligations is inherently disruptive to a system designed to keep us small, but it’s ultimately disruptive to society in the very best way. What is the difference between those who make an impact and those who don’t? They keep going anyway.
When you start to receive backlash, it’s proof that you’re doing something right. Ultimately, the degree to which you can grow your fire is directly proportional to the amount of blowback you’re willing and able to withstand. It’s important to remember that the criticism you get when you dare to live on fire is predictable, and none of it is personal.
4. You may need to set an intentional controlled burn in your life.
Since time immemorial, controlled burns have been recognized as a tool that helps preserve and maintain the ecosystem by reducing the risk of wildfires. This same principle of fire management is as true for your life as it is for the earth. A controlled burn is a way to audit all the demands on your time, energy, and attention and decide what to do less of, what to do more of, and what to get rid of altogether. That could be as big as ending a relationship, stepping away from a job, or reassessing how you parent, or as small as giving up a volunteer role that’s taking too much of your time or changing how you consume social media.
“A controlled burn is a way to audit all the demands on your time, energy, and attention.”
Controlled burns are practices of self-care that clear the debris in your life and create space for unearthing the most authentic version of yourself. They are also ways to reform yourself into something more powerful. It’s a way to remove things from your life that no longer serve you and, in turn, help you set boundaries that preserve your energy for what you truly desire. Enforcing these boundaries takes practice but, over time, you’ll find that you can hold those boundaries more confidently and that you have a stronger connection to your own wants and needs—a lifelong practice that allows you to protect your energy.
5. You deserve to leave a legacy.
The word “legacy” is often equated with big, extravagant gifts or accomplishments, like buildings named after wealthy donors or powerful companies. But I want us to start redefining what “legacy” means. It should not be about your achievements or wealth—it’s about paying attention to what gives your life meaning and giving others permission to do the same. It’s living in a way that ensures that you won’t have regrets. In fact, the most common deathbed regret is that they didn’t live a life true to themselves.
Your fire may be something in your personal life, like investing more in friendship or getting serious about your health. Maybe it’s a professional goal, like making a risky career pivot or asking for a promotion. Or maybe it’s politically driven, like volunteering or starting an organization. No matter what it is, when you give yourself permission to pursue what you desire, you stop asking for approval and start building a life that is authentically your own. When your life isn’t dictated by what society says you should be or do, you can live fully. That’s a radical, even political, act. You deserve to leave a legacy, to get to the end of your life and know that you burned bright.
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