What Are You Afraid of Right Now?
The year is underway, your goals are in front of you, and you’ve been sticking to your new habits like clockwork — eating better, sleeping more, meditating 15 minutes per day, motivating yourself and your team on the daily. You’ve had a few wins this month, but there’s something holding you back. You start to feel that mental blockage that you can’t get out of your head, but you can’t put your finger on that irking feeling. Sure, you didn’t close the deal fast enough or your team isn’t performing like you talked about in Q4 to shape them up for this quarter. Maybe it’s a personal struggle at home blocking you from pushing yourself.
What are you afraid of right now?
Don’t think about yesterday, not tomorrow, not even in a minute — right now. What does it feel like? What does it look like when it actually happens? What is going to happen when it comes true? Seems pretty scary, if you’re imagining the greatest train wreck of your career. And that’s all it is — the feeling of what you think MIGHT happen. A self-deceptive thought that spirals into trails of mental fucks. For some of you deep nerdy and somewhat narcissistic types, not recognizing the feeling is what the Arbinger Institute calls the ‘Notion of Resistance’- “avoiding the very thing that presumably would help most relieve the emotional pain you are suffering.” This is the beginning of a much deeper analysis in what the institute describes as self-deception, stemmed from self-betrayal. While this is a deep Freudian(ish) analysis, the study gets straight to the point of why people become afraid. It doesn’t take much for a feeling like that to take shape and consume your hour and even worse, the rest of your day.
Where did it come from?
Whether it is something that has been building over time or an allergic reaction to a conversation, identify the source of the fear. If you’re not sure, write down 5 possible scenarios that led you from that point to a growing feeling inside you. Write about who was involved and how they make you feel. Be honest with yourself when you do it. If you can’t truthfully uncover your feeling of where fear spurs, then it will be hard to move through how to get over it.
Why did it make you feel afraid?
Here is another place where honesty is critical. When you can write down and/or say out loud why it makes you feel afraid, you are attacking the feeling and taking away its power. Think what I’m saying is stupid? Put your judgment away and give yourself more credit than what you’re giving yourself. Work through a few layers of “why” — what that means is your first instinct isn’t always the right one. Sometimes the fear is a cause/affect situation, or there are multiple interaction points that finally led to the fear. When you work through all the possible intersections, you are ready to transform your narrative to a new one.
What are you going to do about it?
For a few months, I was working through my fear of not earning another client…ever! I was convinced my business was going to fail, entrepreneurship wasn’t for me, I wasn’t smart enough to work with top startup CEO’s (even though I just finished working with 3 funded companies), and I should probably just find a job because that sounded much easier. I failed to recognize that I’m already an accomplished founder and already have the experience and results proving my success. The feeling came when two major clients ended their engagements around the same time. I had to scramble to my next brand which was causing deep fears of failure and doubt. I took a step back, wrote about where the fear was coming from and how it made me feel. I needed an action plan and something immediate. I dragged myself out of the office and scheduled 3–4 startup and community events to attend. It didn’t matter if I met a new startup, because honestly, networking isn’t an immediate turnaround for my type of work. However, I knew it was going to be one step forward. It was an opportunity to talk about myself and my company. It helped me work through my questions and seek answers in a positive and constructive way. I changed the conversation (in my head).
Ask yourself if giving up is right for you?
This is a true question because sometimes you’ve been through the ringer, and you’re fucking over it. For many others, this is a wake up call to keep moving, change the conversation, and realize your true power. It is the moment where “the gritty” separates from “the give it up”. At the end of the day I:
- think faster and am more succinct about my thoughts
- can carry broader conversations and synthesize information on a wide range of industries
- know my answers are invaluable
- understand people more empathetically
- inspire others around me to live their best lives
- can have happy hour when I want to.
Ready for that new day?
