The honest truth about fear in business

I felt sick the day after I offered Chris, my new videographer, a role.

You might be surprised to read this today and worried that Chris might find out. Don’t worry - he knows! I told him and we filmed a video about it.

The feelings surprised me.

I’ve hired before.

I’ve had teams before.

I’ve made leaps before.

But this time it felt different.

I felt resourced. I felt certain. I felt ready.

So why the anxiety?

Anxiety often arises when our brain’s fear circuitry - particularly the amygdala - triggers a stress response that doesn’t quite match the situation. It was useful from an evolutionary standpoint, helping humans to anticipate danger. But now, it can misfire, leading to things like catastrophising a situation (I’m going to go bankrupt!), focusing on the threat and not the reality (all my sales with dry up), feelings of being ‘beyond our comfort zone’ (I’m not ready for this, it’s too much!).

Do any of those sound familiar? Other, more subtle ones include:

• I’m not good enough / cut out to do this
• Someone is going to find me out
• I’m not doing enough!
• Something bad is about to happen
• Other people seem to find this easier!
• I need to learn one more thing, then I’ll be ready

I recognise all of those.

In fact, I’ll let you in on a secret. I started my masters in Psychology because I wanted to know what made a great entrepreneur. I didn’t know if I had what it took to ‘make it’, to go all the way. I wanted to find the perfect formula for entrepreneurship and model it. Ha. I’ll tell you how that goes. For now, I’ll just keep showing up shall I?

The hard thing about entrepreneurship is that we have to live in this zone of discomfort to grow. We’re constantly in the leap between safe havens. And just when we’ve mastered one thing, we have to master another, and another. This constant cycle of growth is very taxing on our nervous systems, on the very human part of ourselves, and this tax shows up as fear, anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, procrastination. If we put it off, we can’t fail right? We sit with the pain of avoidance, just to save ourselves from the pain of change.

For this reason, being successful as an entrepreneur isn’t really about the leap itself. It’s actually about the gap in between one version of ourselves and the next. It’s about how we resource ourselves in that gap. It’s about how we react to the feelings of discomfort, which only show up in the gap. It’s about how we choose to act as we land on the other side of the gap.

I find that when I make ‘the leap’, I want to stay the same. I want to have the same feelings, the same comforts, the same thoughts. I want to prioritise the same things, do the same activities, continue with the same behaviours. But I can’t. The net sum of those things is the person on the other side of the gap.

To continue is to go back.

To change is to stick the landing.

And this is what we’re exploring in today’s episode.

Ready to dive in?

If you’re in the middle of a leap - or find yourself avoiding one - this episode will help you to see where you are in the process, discover what it’s going to take to stick the landing, and focus on the person you need to become, not the fear holding you back!

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🔗 Want to go deeper? Join the Be The Person membership for the mindset and healing work required to make this leap: https://betheperson.co.uk/membership/