How to Overcome the Fear of Starting a Business*

*or just plain changing your life

Welcome Video / Lack of Clarity
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You can’t accomplish what you want if you don’t know what it is. Do you want to find yourself? Become debt-free? Start a business? Write a book or online course? Get into a relationship—or out of one? Do you want to be happy in your body, or get off a medication you’ve become a little too dependent on?

Until you name what you want to claim, you might not fully, consciously realize that it’s something you want—or that there may be some clear steps to get there.

Now, the steps might be uncomfortable—and this may, in fact, be why you’ve been avoiding claiming what you want aloud. But once you say it, or do the work to scrounge the answer out of yourself, you’ll have to admit that there are means to get there, if the outcome is something you want more than you don’t want to do the hard work to get there.

Not sure what you want? Download the workbook at the top of this page, grab a mug of tea or glass of wine, and set aside a few minutes to get introspective.

Dig deeper with this additional material: Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

A Ceiling of Discipline (Discipline without Focus)
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I hold a belief that humanity in general suffers from Discipline Dysmorphia—the belief that we are more or less disciplined than we actually are or have the capacity to be.

Many of us have been disciplined at some point in our lives, about something important, that showed us what we had the capability to do or be. It could have been getting up before the sun every morning for months to go running, or getting on our knees at the same time every day to pray, or learning to put away 10% of every check into savings and watching it steadily grow. Whatever it was, when we did it, we realized we possessed something we’d not realized before: discipline!

Of course, most of us have had the other experience, too—where we were so worn out or defeated from expending energy in too many areas of our lives that even when we still had the ability in us to do great things, we just didn’t.

The problem is, when we’re in this latter scenario, we often still view ourselves as disciplined people—as in, people who could do what we say we want to do, without ever giving up anything in our lives now; we just gotta hunker down and do it. And that simply isn’t true. It just leads to a lot of flagellation and frustration.

It’s likely if there’s something in your life you want that you’re not giving your “all” to, it’s because you’ve already tapped your disciplinary energy somewhere else in your life. Maybe work, maybe a relationship, maybe another dream. So the question now is, is that area of my life more important to me than the thing I say I want, or can some (or all) of the energy I spend there go into the thing I want?

See page 2 of the worksheet for help with this!

Dig deeper with this additional material: Essentialism by Greg McKeown

The Upper Limit Problem & Impostor Syndrome
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UPPER LIMIT PROBLEM

The Upper Limit Problem was a term coined by Gay Hendricks and is detailed thoroughly in his book, The Big Leap. I highly recommend supplementing this post with reading that book.

Think of an Upper Limit Problem like a comfort zone. When you near the edge of your comfort zone, you panic a little bit, and start taking measures to get back to the place you feel safe, right? Well, the Upper Limit Problem is a way to describe that phenomenon when you start unconsciously self-sabotaging in the areas of your professional, creative, or relational life.

The reason that this is unconscious (or at best, subconscious) is that most of us hold beliefs we don’t even know we hold—things like, “I don’t think I should ever make more money than my sibling,” or, “This company has never had a female CEO so I can’t apply.” Even when part of us wants something, as we try to reach for it, another, unconscious part of us can go to extreme measures to keep the first part from succeeding.

It becomes easier to identify this problem in ourselves once we gain clarity on what we want. We can say, “I want X,” and almost immediately follow it up with, “but I can’t have it because Y.” And therein can lie the Upper Limit Problem.

To combat your Upper Limits, you first must confront your beliefs. See page 3 of the cheat sheet for tips on this!

Dig deeper with this additional material: The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

IMPOSTOR SYDROME

Impostor Syndrome is that feeling you experience when you privately wonder if everyone around you knows you are a fraud.

I say “knows” because you can’t have Impostor Syndrome without first believing yourself on some level that you’re not ready for something you’re going after.

Impostor Syndrome pops in its devilish head during job interviews, career changes, new relationships, creative pursuits, and just generally the times you get excited about something new and start to stretch yourself—and it works. You get the second interview, or start the business (and actually get customers), or go on the second, third, fifth date—and you get this sense of, “Could all this good really be happening to me?”

The best ways I’ve found to combat Impostor Syndrome are to (1) remember that everyone starts somewhere, and (2) realize that everyone gets Imposter Syndrome, from the most popular kid in school, to celebrities, to your parents. So you’re not alone. What’s going to set you apart is not so much whether or not you are a fraud, but whether you do the work to overcome that feeling instead of letting it dictate how you think and behave.

For a refreshing perspective when battling Impostor Syndrome, read this article.

Old Beliefs & Negative Messages
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OLD BELIEF SYSTEMS

Old belief systems are perhaps even harder to identify than unconscious beliefs like the ones we covered in point no. 3. When you know your beliefs and you’ve had them since, well, forever, it can be hard to learn to think in a new way.

Take, for example, a person who was always excellent at science and math growing up, and pursued opportunities that utilized those skills into adulthood. The belief that “I’m suited for science and math jobs” could override the possibility that a more creative career opportunity might be a great fit. It’s not an Upper Limit Problem, because it’s not a comfort zone issue; but it’s still an issue, because the person in this scenario might overlook a possibility because they’re not looking for it as an option.

Or here’s another example: Maybe you always thought you wanted to live in the country. You pictured a backyard wedding, a rustic cottage home, playing in a huge yard with your nieces and nephews when the family gathered for the holidays… and that picture’s been in your head so long that you don’t consider that the internship that brought you to New York has actually demonstrated how well you’re cut out for city living—how much you love the rush of being on the subway, how a rooftop cocktail party is never more than a 10-minutes’ walk away, and how you’re able to network every week in your climb to the top of your industry.

To uncover some potential old beliefs and reshape them, see page 5 in your workbook!

NEGATIVE MESSAGES

This one is huge!

There’s a saying that we are the product of the 5 people we spend the most time with—which is why it’s wise to keep good company. However, that saying was around long before social media was so prevalent, so now I expect that the 5 accounts we follow most avidly, or celebrities we look up to, or other outside forces may be impacting the people we’re becoming as much as the people we regularly see face-to-face.

To put it more simply, you need to choose what you consume. There are musicians, politicians, YouTube sensations, and other big personalities that may be captivating, but also putting a lot of negative messages into your senses every day… and what you hear does eventually shape your belief systems, which quickly shapes your actions. It’s important to recognize when they way you think has started to change because of someone or something you choose to interact with every day—and then choose to put positive messages and people in the place of negative ones.

For some of the options you have to change what you see (you have more power than you think), see page 6 in your workbook!