It’s been a week since I took the leap of faith and faced a big fear of mine. I have to say, it’s been a liberating week. So much stress has been lifted off my shoulders and I am now motivated to continue to face my other fears and continue my journey.
As I promised, I have been keeping a fear journal. Anytime I am feeling particularly anxious about something, or feeling those pangs of fear about my creative endeavours I write it down in my fear journal and even just that is helping in more ways that I thought it would.
It’s funny how things start to seem more and more clear when you decide to take action. It seemed that every podcast, book or article that I came across last week touched on the element of fear in our lives, especially the fear that comes about with new life endeavours. One of my favorite creative entrepreneur podcasts had on Niyc Pidgeon, a positive psychologist and success coach touched on a couple of things that I wanted to share with you all because it’s so relevant to this conversation.
Niyc mentioned three steps that I think are super relevant when it comes to dealing with fear. She said to: acknowledge the fear, name the fear and own the fear. Without knowing it, I was loosely doing this by keeping my fear journal, but the light bulb moment really came when I heard her explain how it’s completely normal and human to be fearful, but it’s the ability to move past the fear is what really counts.
This week the feeling of fear that kept coming to mind was the fear of failure. But as soon as I started to feel that fear, I went through the three steps that Niyc Pidgeon suggested and I can’t even describe how free it feels to be able to not let that fear consume me.
I really love that quote that says “Fail stands for First Attempt In Learning”. Whenever that feeling struck this past week, I would think about this quote and how true it is. We only grow from our mistakes and experience, so how could failure ever be such a bad thing?
Do you have a fear that is holding you back in your career or personal life? Let’s chat about it in an attempt to take away the power of fear.
XO,
Cristin
OMG! I love the idea of having a journal for fears. I have never thought of writing down what it is that I am fearing.