Overcoming Your Business Fears
If you’ve been listening to the last couple episodes of the Your Highest Self podcast, you’d know that we’ve been really leaning into all things purpose. Today we’re going to be tackling common fears that I see in my clients and how we can overcome them!
Before I dive in, I want to language check myself because a lot of times we talk about fears, the common thought and energy surrounding them is how to overcome them, how to GET OVER my fear of x, y, z. Instead I’d like to invite you to change the word overcome to “moving through” your business fears. A lot of the times when you want to overcome something, you are put in the mindset of thinking that you won’t experience that fear anymore once it’s been “overcome,” for lack of a better word. You think that you’ll no longer feel this fear and it’ll be completely gone, when that’s not really how fear works. You become stuck in this negative loop of continuing to feel and experience fear causing you to never take action. You might feel this fear and feed your mind with not feeling ready yet due to this fear when that simply is not true. How can we feel the fear and still take action anyway? (Shoutout and brownie points to anyone who remembers this being part of the highest self manifesto!)
Let’s dive into the common fears that you may or may not be aware of! (These were taken from the personal experience of myself and my clients)
Fear of not being enough to show up for what you want to do
Other ways you can say this one is feeling fundamentally flawed; and I’m finding that this fear is the most common one I come across when talking to anyone who hasn’t taken off with being the fullest expression of themselves yet. The limiting belief that resides underneath this fear is the worthiness wound. Moving through this fear is a couple layers deep. It’s dependent on how this fear shows up for you and your emotions.
If this fear does resonate with you, I invite you to reflect: What emotion does this feeling trigger? What is the trauma associated with this?
For example, say that this fear triggers unworthiness and you overall just don’t feel good enough to step into whatever it is your heart is truly yearning for. -- What is the trauma/experience that happened in your life that told you you were unworthy? What experience did you attach meaning to so as a result, you believe that you are not worthy?
Moving through your fears is not about overcoming, pushing, and completely eliminating them. It’s about looking at our past and processing these experiences into our system so we can take the learning lessons and move forward through them. A lot of the time as humans who face many experiences, we attach negative emotions to them; we attach meaning to everything. We hold onto these negative feelings because it protects us and because we have trauma associated with it.
When you acknowledge where you’re at you are then able to deepen your understanding of what needs to change or shift. Once you have acknowledged that, ask yourself: What can I learn from this? What are the learning lessons from this experience that I can take and move forward? Let these learning lessons guide you and protect you and allow it to give you the permission to move through the negative emotions associated with your trauma/experience.
Quick NLP tip: Identify the negative emotion, identify the trauma, and identify the learning lessons.
If you’re doing the work, you will always feel fear but that fear will not have the same hold on you as it did before because you’ll know that the fear is just trying to protect you.
Fear of failing/not seeing through what you aspire to do
If you’ve been around for a while, I have an episode where I talk about the two words that are stunting your growth which is the phrase, “I know.” In that episode I talked about doing all the research/learning to launch my business at the time and I never took action because I was afraid of not seeing through what I wanted to do. For this fear, I invite you to reflect: When did you decide that you weren’t going to follow through? When did you decide that you were going to fail?
A lot of times, this fear comes from adopting a story you heard from someone else. Maybe someone made you feel shame for quitting something too early. Maybe you didn’t finish school which created this story that you’re someone who doesn’t see things through. I want to offer a perspective shift; maybe it’s not failing you fear but rather the fear of success. That if you do this, how will you keep up? A lot of people think that success is a burden and the more you experience it, the more you’d have to take on and that’s essentially where the fear gets created.
Fear of not being able to afford investments
This is definitely surrounding money mindset and a fear that is very real. If you are not able to afford the investments you have put into your business, it triggers that primal need to want to be safe.
Two perspectives I’d love to offer: You should invest with the intent that you will be making a return on your investment & please don’t put coaching on a credit card.
If you’re working with a coach who takes your transformation to heart, they are more likely to work with you. Again, I want to reiterate that this perspective is based on my opinions and experiences.
Have discernment with what you can and cannot afford. This fear dives into the topic of having financial literacy, knowing your expenses, knowing your income, and being able to project your finances to know how much money you’re going to make that year so that you make aligned, smart business decisions. A lot of coaches and entrepreneurs don’t have the best relationship with money; and if this is a fear that you have I encourage you to practice by looking at your bank account every single day and have gratitude for the money that’s in there. The relationship with money is very similar to having a relationship with your partner. How can you expect to improve that relationship if you’re refusing to even look at it? Express gratitude for it being there and for the money that comes in. Put intention around your financial decision making processes.
Fear that it doesn’t make sense to others
Here’s the thing, your vision isn’t going to make sense to anyone else because it doesn’t need to. However you address a higher power in life, has put that vision in you FOR you. This is where self-trust, self-belief, and self-worth are so strongly because you need to be committed to your vision so much that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. Moving through this fear is a process of checking in with yourself. Give yourself permission to acknowledge and show up for yourself.
Your vision and purpose is not supposed to make sense to anyone but yourself. For example, my husband is the most supportive person in the world to me and even he didn’t understand my vision. He questioned why I wanted to leave the competition realm because he saw how well I did in that space and didn’t fully grasp why I wanted to shift my business to what I am doing today. He didn’t question me from not believing in me but rather questioned me for my protection. Understand and know that your calling and purpose is not going to make sense to other people and the people that love you the most will most likely not get it and that’s okay.
Fear of not knowing what do, how to do, when to do it
First, I see this as imposter syndrome. However, when you boil this all the way down it comes to the fear of being seen. Having this fear shows up a lot with people creating content. I.e. What do I post? How do I post this? When should I post this? What’s everyone else doing? -- These questions are too small. If you want a better life you have to ask better questions. It doesn’t matter how you post. I’m here to tell you that you need to look within and heal this limiting belief of “I can’t do it,” so you can get in alignment with what your highest self is trying to do. How would your highest self approach this? What do YOU want to do? Do you want to post everyday? Do you want to post once a week? Does writing long captions make you feel good? Does it excite you to create reels? Get in touch with your intuition and inner wisdom. Start to acknowledge that these fears are here because they’re keeping you small.
It’s easier to focus on these small things compared to shifting your focus on the fear of being seen. It’s easier to dwell on not knowing what content to put out as opposed to really asking yourself, why am I so afraid of being seen? The answer to this question? It’s because you aren’t seeing yourself.
Tools to overcome your fear
Clinical Hypnotherapy - When you are put into a trance, you are able to bypass your critical consciousness and you are able to input positive suggestions into your subconscious mind. I used to have this fear around Facebook ads. I didn’t know how to effectively use them and my energy around them wasn’t good. I had the hypnotherapist implant positive suggestions around my fear of Facebook ads and find myself using them this month for a launch coming up.
Accountability/Community - If you are having such a hard time with your fears, find a community that you can be vulnerable and share and be inspired by others who are also open. You are not alone. (Shameless plug, the evolv collective is perfect for this!) Fears will never go away, you just get stronger.
