How to overcome the Fear of Leaping.
Photo credit to www.aistesaulyte.co.uk
After years of frustration in her marketing role that felt like repeating the same pattern of initial hope and then disappointment over and over again even when she was landing a new job in a different company this client decided it was time to face her fears.
She was hugely afraid of making a real big change by leaving the corporate sector she was in and actually starting a food venture of her own.
She came from a family where reputation and job title was very important and she was especially clinging on to the feeling of “safety” that being in that kind of job would give her.
What it took to really change this pattern was to switch from feeling the fear and then running away in the next safe job to actually facing it and becoming friends with it.
I think that fear has such a bad reputation, connected with a lot of shame, as If when we feel fear we are alone in the world while all the others are confident and know what they are doing, but that’s a mental trick that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We all experience fear since it’s a primal human emotion ( together with love, anger and joy).
Sometimes fear it’s totally justified and necessary because there is an actual danger in front of us like a bear coming out of the woods during a camping trip, but other times it’s a response to something new that we simply haven’t experienced before.
So it builds up in our minds as this huge mountain to overcome while the actual danger is not there.
Today I want to share my point of view as a Coach that witnesses incredible humans experience different fears a lot when they’re leaping into their new career as well as experiencing my own fears every time I do something new in my own business.
So how do we overcome the fear of taking a leap of faith ?
We learn to normalize it as a crucial part of the process.
This is a huge starting point because when we remember that fear is a PART of the process we can expect it to arrive at some point and not be surprised by it. Being courageous women that do things differently from our close community is scary and will bring up ALL kinds of fears accumulated there since childhood. It's totally normal and ok! Once we know that we can create a ritual of self-regulating our nervous system every time a fear arises and tend to it like a mum tends to his small child. Some examples of self-regulating activities are associating a fearful task to a pleasurable one, for example taking a bath and relaxing before a power session of networking with new potential employers. Or lighting your favorite candle with a glass of wine while sending your CV or creating your business plan.
We use Fear as our own GPS system.
Our body reactions are intelligent and they are there for a reason, to protect us from danger. So use the fear sensation as a way to guide you. First of all distinguish between an actual justified fear like a danger in front of you or when your female instinct tells you that that person looks like someone to avoid from that fear that comes up but feels expansive on the other side. For example the fear of charging someone for your passion may feel terrifying at first and your monkey mind may come up with a million reasons why you shouldn’t do it, but you know that it’s a growth opportunity and exciting at the same time. Can you spot the difference in your body?
We go back to trust.
When you understand that the fear is a good sign to challenge yourself and take the leap it’s time to go back to trust. If you look at situations where you run away from the challenge, what was the exact moment you stopped trusting? I find it super interesting to notice when you usually stopped trusting yourself because THAT is the point where we want to reverse the pattern and choose a different action. For the client I mentioned above she would usually stop trusting herself at the idea of creating her own business. She wouldn’t be afraid of changing companies because she had done that a few times already and she knew the swing of it, almost feeling reassured by what she would find there, but the idea of becoming her own boss was overwhelming and scary because she had never done it before. So there were a series of blockages arising in that moment and what we did was looking in the eyes of each one of these fears.
We used the tool of writing a FEAR INVENTORY which means writing down all the fears and asking some questions along the lines of these ones :
What do I fear?
Why am I afraid ?
Is this fear based on true or false information ?
What is it that you want changed about this fear, that you will do whatever it takes?
What is your new plan of action/inaction with regards to this fear?
In her case some of the answers were related to failing miserably at her new venture and looking like a fool in the eyes of her family and ex-colleagues and losing all the benefits of a stable salary she had before.
These fears were based on her imagination and not on a real fact that happened so the plan to reverse them was to remind herself that she was totally safe and sound in the moments when these fears would come up and having a self-soothing activity like doing some yoga stretches in her case to relax her tense muscles. Finally the last step of gaining trust was considering the question “How can I trust even deeper in this moment?” instead of losing trust and going back in her shell.
Trusting even deeper would mean for her to take that daily baby step to move the venture forward like contacting other food business owners and finding out how they got started or calculating how much money she would need every month to cover her basic costs.
This last question is really what changed the game for this client and for me personally as a coach because it means leaning into your strategy exactly when you want to run away from it and that’s the ultimate self-trust act, to keep on going when you have absolutely no evidence that it’s working out!
That’s where the magic appears because you’re going over the barrier that so many people do not even try to cross and I do believe that is always rewarded by the Universe :-)
