How to Overcome Your Fear (of Succeeding in Business)
A couple weeks ago I shared with you how my performance jitters led to picking a fight with my husband and then crying in his arms after a powerful realization. If you haven’t listened to the story, read my last post here.
Now I want to share what I’ve done since and how I used that breakthrough to determine my next actions. More importantly, I want to show you how you can apply these same actions into your life to overcome challenging emotions like nervousness, fear, and anxiety.
So there I am …
thrown in to singing in a quartet, feeling vulnerable as the only person singing my part in front of my entire chorus. I was sweating (thank god for deodorant!) and distracted by the knot in my stomach. No WAY would I put myself back in that situation, right?
Wrong.
Here is the key: you can not move around your fears.
The only way to overcome them, is to pull up your boots and go damn straight INTO them. There are few exceptions to that.
The universe has an interesting way of giving you the opportunities to do exactly that. As our big holiday show approaches, an email went out asking for a baritone to join a small quartet. Guess which part I sing? Yup.
So I went for it.
I’ve started practicing “I’ll be home for Christmas” with three other women, preparing to sing in front of our director in hopes that we will be approved to sing on the big stage.
Why do we live with fear?
Often we think that when it comes to fear that we just need to live with it. Why do we do this? Here are a few limiting beliefs you may have around shifting your fear.
- “It is just a phobia or a fear I’ve always had. There is nothing I can do about it.”
- “I’m afraid of feeling the fear, it is too paralyzing, so I just need to avoid situations that make me afraid.”
- “You can’t remove fears, so I just need to live with it.”
This is absolutely false. EVEN when it comes to phobias.
Let me tell you a story about my amazing, awesome Dad. As long as he can remember, he has had a paralyzing fear of heights. One time, I bought him tickets to a Broadway show as a gift. We were in the high Mezzanine and when we got to the seats, his body took over and he was so paralyzed with fear we had to get different seats on the ground floor.
The only way he could fly was with a few glasses of wine. Forget rooftop bars or rooftop anything. On the way to a wedding at the top of a mountain, he clenched the car door handle, literally white knuckling it the whole way. Poor man- what misery!
This was just the way is was, right? For all of my life, I’ve watched us arrange around Dad’s fear of heights. And he has suffered for his whole life.
Until 6 months ago.
At the ripe age of 63 he said, ‘enough’ and started to see a cognitive behavioral therapist (we all laugh that it took him that long!).
Just last month, he willingly stood at the edge of a two story building railing and snapped a photo to send to his therapist as proof that he has been taking steps through his fears.
The kicker? My father always thought his fear of heights was his and his alone. What he discovered was that his mother was afraid of heights and in a pivotal childhood moment crossing a bridge, in seeing her reaction, his developing brain said “My mother is afraid of heights, so heights are scary and I need to be scared too.”
Sometimes our fears are passed on to us!!
Seeing possibilities instead of fears
I hope you’re still with me. I also hope you are starting to see my point.
Most people don’t have what they want in life not because they are afraid, but rather they are unwilling to not be afraid anymore. The unknown of what is on the other side of the fear. Sometimes it feels easier to avoid what makes us afraid, but I ask you: AT WHAT COST?
What is possible on the other side of your fears?
Abundance?
Your dream business?
The love of your life?
Take it from my Dad, who would shout from a tall mountain: DON’T WAIT 63 YEARS TO FACE WHAT SCARES YOU!!
Don’t live a life ‘white knuckling’ either because that is not ‘going into the fear,’ that is ‘suffering through it.’
There is a difference. One empowers you, the other does not.
How to Overcome Your Fears
Stop avoiding the discomfort altogether through distractions or negative habits. Want to know the interesting thing about fear? When you actually allow yourself to feel it, it starts to wane.
With the right tools, techniques, and support you can lower the body’s automatic response that has paralyzed you in the past. This can be achieved through many modalities such as therapy, body scan meditations and tapping (EFT) to name a few.
The point is you DO have a choice. You do not have to live with your fears. So now that you know this, are you willing to do something about it?
That, friend, is entirely up to you.
Will you leap?
