One Simple Exercise to Overcome Fear and Anxiety In Your Business

Welcome back boss. You know, I get this question all the time about how do I overcome fear as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner specifically? Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of putting myself out there, fear of rejection, fear of what other people are gonna think, right? All the things that can stop us from doing the things that we actually want to do in our business. Comment below and let me know if you've ever asked this question yourself.

You know, I've been at this whole small business thing for over 20 years, which is still super weird to say, and I've been at this whole mindset coaching, belief breakthrough work for over 10 years. So you could say, I know a thing or two about fear, especially as an entrepreneur and in order to help you learn how to overcome it. What I wanna do is explain two things. You gotta understand two things about it first, and then I'm gonna give you a practice to try for yourself to help you begin to overcome any fears that you might be facing.

#1: Fear is Normal

So the first thing you need to understand about fear is that it's freaking normal. By normal I don't mean just that it's common, although yes, of course it's common. I mean, normal as in it's natural, as in it's supposed to be happening. We demonize fear. We turn it into the bad guy. We try to ditch it without actually understanding what it means. Here's the thing I want you to understand when I say that fear is normal. Fear is a mechanism in your brain designed to keep you safe and to help you maintain your ability to meet your needs. That's what fear is for. And if we didn't have that, we would do all kinds of stupid stuff and put ourself into really bad situations and get ourself messed up. You want to have fear.

It's not a bad thing to have it. You just don't want it to control the things that are actually necessary or that are helpful or that you want to be doing instead. And I could even backtrack that a little bit and say, fear is not just about our ability to keep us safe, because that is actually one of the needs that it is trying to meet. So ultimately you could really just say that fear is a way that your brain tells yourself how to meet or protect your ability to meet your needs. And when I say needs, I don't want you to confuse this with our wants or our strategies to meet our needs, which are generally what our wants are.

So for instance, a strategy to meet our needs might be more money in the bank, right? It's not that we need more money in the bank. It's that we want more money in the bank to help us meet our deeper needs. Needs for beauty, needs for order, needs for security and safety, for sure, needs for community, connection, fun, adventure, whatever those things might be for you, that you are trying to meet. The money and the relationship and anything else that you want in your life are just strategies to help you meet those deeper underlying human needs.

So I've talked about this in another video, but fear is not self-sabotage. Fear is self-protection. It is a necessary component for us to be able to meet our needs and keep ourselves safe in order to do so. Your mind does not want to sabotage you. Your mind wants to do what it knows how to do to meet your needs. And that is all. And this is important to understand, because if you think that fear is abnormal or that it's the bad guy, the villain, you shouldn't feel it, you're gonna be working against your nature versus working with it. And when you understand that it is normal, then you can start to actually work with it, which I'm gonna show you how to do in that practice that I'm gonna show you in just a minute.

#2: Fear Can Go Away (Kinda)

The second thing you need to understand about fear is that it can go away kinda depending on how you're talking about fear. Yes, it is normal, but that doesn't mean that it's a life sentence, because your fear is designed to help you to meet your needs. Once your needs are met, your fear can start to go away. It starts to realize my job here is done. We're safe, we're protected. Our needs are protected. And therefore I can recede into the background or go away completely. Now, what I mean by fear can go away kind of is it depends on what you're talking about. When you talk about fear, fears in general are always gonna be there. They're a natural human emotion and therefore we're always gonna feel them.

You're gonna have little fears pop up here and there that's normal. What's not normal is to have a fear come up and stay with you and paralyze you. That's what actually creates a problem. And that's where you wanna really focus your attention on helping that particular fear go away. The great thing too, is that the more individual fears you help to go away, the less fear in general is going to come up for you. Because you start to tell your mind, your brain that actually we are safe and we have a history of being able to show that individual fears. These little things are actually not that big of a deal. And so they stop coming up because they stop being a helpful way for you to meet your needs. Is this making sense? Comment below with 'sense' if you're starting to get what I'm talking about. So the real difference between successful business owners or entrepreneurs and people who get stuck is not whether or not they feel fear. They're all feeling fear, trust me. I've worked with some very successful people who still experience fear. That's not the thing that's tripping you up.

The difference between success and being stuck is how you respond to that fear and the stories that you tell yourself about it. If you tell yourself the story that this fear is here, and that means it's true versus here's this emotion I'm having that is telling me something about what I'm needing. Those two different stories are going to completely, radically change the way you respond to that fear.

#3: How to Overcome Your Fear With One Simple Exercise

So like I said, I've been teaching belief breakthrough for a long time, since 2010. And there are a lot of practices that I have that can help you to overcome fear, especially before it comes up before it becomes paralyzing. But chances are, if you're watching this video right now, you're already dealing with some fear. You need to know what to do with it when it's already there. So I wanna walk you through this practice to help you understand it. But before I do that, I have to make sure that you also understand that taking action is going to be part of what shifts this fear for you. It's gonna be part of what makes it go away because only action will solidify the mindset work that you're gonna be doing.

Putting something into action is gonna show your brain that you are indeed safe, that your needs can be met in this way. And it's a little bit like turning on the light in a dark room. It looked like scary shadows over there, like a monster in the corner. But once you turned on that light, you were then able to see it was just a pile of dirty clothes that need to be cleaned up, right? And it's the same thing with your fear. So this practice I'm gonna give you, I want you to promise me that you're gonna take action on it. I want you to actually do this as soon as you are done watching this video. It's only gonna take you a couple minutes, it doesn't have to take you much longer than that, but the longer you put it off, the more you're gonna forget about it, not come back to it and stay stuck in that fear. Deal?

So I really want you to make sure that you put this into action because concepts, ideas, theories, all these types of things are helpful, but they don't do anything like action does.

Step #1:

So the first step I want you to take is to close your eyes, take a deep breath and tell your fear "thank you" for doing its very best to serve you given the limited perspective. information. or experiences it has had up to this point. I actually want you to sit with this for a few moments and breathe deeply as you are doing this, as you are thanking your fear and actually finding a reason why it's a good thing, telling your fear, "thank you because you've helped me to do..." what?

The reason that I want you to do this and that this is so important is because when we slow our body down and we slow our breath down, it actually slows down the mechanisms behind fear. Our autonomic nervous system is mostly beyond our control, our heart races, our adrenaline pumps, we have all these things going on in our body that we can't change, but we can change our breath. When you feel fear, your breath becomes shallower and quicker. When you start to lower your breath down and take deeper breaths. It's almost like a little dude is in your brain. And he sees all these little alarms going off in your heart rate and your adrenaline and all these different things, but he sees your breathing start to slow down and therefore he's like, oh, okay, no danger because if there was a real danger, you'd be panting, you'd be running from something scary. Right? And so all those other little fear mechanisms start to shut down too. So this is very intentional why I'm having you do this. I want you to sit, breathe deeply and say "thank you".

Also the reason you're saying thank you is to bring in some form of gratitude recognition so that your mind feels heard and not dismissed. We all know what it's like to feel dismissed. It doesn't make us go away. It doesn't make the problems go away. It's not gonna make your fear go away by dismissing it either. So sit, breathe, say thank you, keep those deep breaths going for a few moments.

Step #2:

And then step number two. I want you to take one action that shows your fear that you are indeed safe and/or your needs will be met by taking forward movements on your goals. So whether that is a marketing goal, a sales goal, a content goal, whatever it is in your business that you feel stuck on right now, I want you to think yourself, what action could I take that would allow me just a little baby step forward, but that would show my fear that I'm still safe. I took this baby step and nothing bad happened. Ask yourself how could I do this thing that scares me in a way that tells my fear that I am safe or loved or free or able to do this or will not be rejected or whatever it might be?

Now, of course, to be able to do this, you might need to backtrack a little bit and figure out what am I actually afraid of? Maybe write some of those things down, figure out what needs am I actually trying to meet with this fear, write some of those things down so that you can figure out a way to do the thing in a way that does not threaten you, that does not threaten your needs. That does not stir up that fear.

So for example, I recently undertook a huge marketing campaign. It was a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars and it freaked me out. It was taking out of my emergency fund. It brought up all kinds of what ifs and you know, what if I can't make payroll and what if something else happens? And what if this fails? And I was just in total fear, but because I sat down and I asked this question and I was just easily able to say, okay, what am I afraid of? All right, well, what would I do then if this were to happen and what could I do over here to prevent this from happening? And because I got myself into action, into problem-solving mode, that fear just went away. I was able to then make a conscious, deliberate, data-driven, smart choice without actually just being paralyzed in fruitless fear.

So again, take a deep breath. Thank your fear. Maybe listen to it a little bit. So you really understand what's going on and then ask yourself, what could I do? How could I do it? What could I do to take action in a way that's gonna allow me to still meet my needs and tell my fear, show my fear that I'm still safe. I want you to comment below if you've done this exercise.

The first time you do it might be a little bit tricky. So don't give up, but definitely let me know how it's going and I'll give you some pointers as well. Also, if you need more help in overcoming your fears as a small business owner, I encourage you to check out my Healthy Hustle Approach.

ARE YOU READY TO OVERCOME THE FEAR IN YOUR BUSINESS?

If you need more help in overcoming your fears as a small business owner I encourage you to check out my Healthy Hustle Roadmap.

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WHAT ABOUT YOU, BOSS?

What fears are you facing in your biz?

Let me know in the comments below.