Feel the fear and do it anyways

I’ve always been a pretty self-aware person (sometimes to a fault) but one of the biggest discoveries I’ve made through starting a coaching business is my fear of failure. 

I discovered that I had been spending a lot of my life doing whatever I could to avoid any possibility of failure by overthinking, procrastinating at times, planning and then planning some more, and at times making myself “smaller” to try to avoid being seen JUST in case there was something that could lead me to publicly fail. 

My fear of failure became very obvious to me right at the start of my coaching training as we were encouraged to start finding practice clients. When I really got down to what was going on, I realised that my fears were not about practicing coaching per se, but actually I was terrified to share this side of my life and career with my network on social media (a seemingly very easy and free way to get the word out there). Not for me.

What was actually underneath the fear of marketing my coaching practice? To name a few there was fear of rejection, fear of judgement, fear of being noticed, fear of being exposed, fear of not being taken seriously. 

I was actually kind of surprised to realise my fear of failure, because I hadn’t really thought of myself as someone who didn’t take chances or put myself out there. Growing up as a dancer, I put myself out there and performed all the time, multiple times a year and always in front of a pretty decent sized crowd. Sometimes we were on stage, sometimes in shopping malls (if you know you know), sometimes for a panel of judges, sometimes for an examiner in a cold white ballet studio. 

Maybe the younger version of myself didn’t have that same notion that something could go totally wrong. OR maybe, I learned to feel that fear so many times, over and over, that my nervous system started getting used to a bit of fear. 

In my adult life I’ve seen proof of this idea again. My last job was one of my first jobs in the creative production industry. I started knowing virtually nothing about creative production specifically, but I did things that scared me every day at work and I learned. Whether it was making a cold call, a nerve-wracking client presentation, facing a problem at work head-on, moving to England to lead our UK presence, I eventually learned that I could get through most, if not all challenges I faced. Sometimes I still had nerves, but I built trust in myself that every time I went for it, I would survive.

In these early days of starting to share more about my coaching practice publicly via my various social platforms, I can feel that my nervous system doesn’t quite trust me yet. I can tell myself over and over that it will be okay, but I can still feel fear inside my body. HOWEVER, instead of letting that fear engulf me, I’ve decided to thank my brain and body for wanting to protect me from “danger” aka shame, embarrassment, annoying someone, no one caring about what I have to say etc, and I’m going to feel the fear and do it any ways.

Yes this motto is a title of a GREAT book by Susan Jeffers that I have yet to read and is collecting dust on my bookshelf, but it is the most fitting phrase for me right now, and maybe for some of you too? 

For me, feeling the fear and doing it anyways is not telling myself that everything will be okay. It’s not pumping myself up and telling myself that I won’t fail. It’s accepting that I cannot control everything that happens. I can work hard, do my best, but I can’t control how every single thing I do is perceived. I can’t make every single person happy or even make everyone like what I have to say. What I can do is I can learn from my mistakes, I can use feedback to fuel my next move, and I can remind myself that the biggest possible failure would be NOT going after what I truly want.

I know that not every mistake I make in my career will be a “failure” per se, but accepting that failure (at some point or another) is inevitable actually makes it easier to just go after it. I remind myself that when failures/mistakes happen I will also be presented with incredible learning opportunities and that all will eventually be okay. 

So here I am, feeling all the fear, all the nerves, all the negative automatic thoughts, the what ifs, the reasons not to, the inclination to want to play it small and safe, and doing it anyways.