Don’t let fear get in the way?

You’ve been running your business for a while now right? Your turnover has been up and down over the last few months or years, but what you’re doing is what you know works. I get it, a campaign you ran last year successfully just didn’t cut the mustard this year. Those around you are seemingly nailing every angle of their business, they are the epitome of ‘busy-ness’. You are projecting the same image but deep down you have the sinking feeling that something just isn’t quite right.

What you aren’t seeing is that those successful people around you, are often having those same niggling doubts about themselves. It’s completely normal. Those feelings of ‘I fear being successful’ to ‘I can’t do this, I don’t deserve it’, the gut wrenching ‘I hate promoting myself’, the downright self-depracating ‘I’m worthless’. All of these emotions have their place in our journey along this path of self-employment.

All too often it’s not even our jobs that have lead us to have these feelings, our pasts, our childhoods and our relationships have left markings within us which characterise how we deal with situations. I know that many of us, myself included have suffered from a fear of rejection – this can be in relationships or in business. We want to be accepted, we want to be liked. This is one our basic needs as humans as shown in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. After air, water, shelter, food, feeling safe and secure we cannot expect to achieve high self esteem without having met the requirements of feeling loved, having a sense of belonging both within our relationships and our friendships. These are our social needs and sometimes when an element of those are missing we struggle with our self-esteem and self-worth.

Feeling safe and secure is the 2^nd rung in the hierarchy and this element combines our environment – having rules in place to help us feel safe from harm, having an income so that we can pay our rent and mortgages. There’s a reason why Maslow structured his pyramid in the way he did, it simplifies our progression to being truly content – he calls is self actualisation.

Take a minute and think about where in YOUR pyramid you might have elements lacking in fulfilment and how those many be having an impact of your day to day life and consequently on your business too. Right now I’m assuming that you are on the right track to achieving rungs 1 and 2, I’m hear to help you work through your fears and doubts so you can move higher up the steps towards self-actualisation.

As always life will throw curveballs at us to knock us back down from time to time, I’m a great believer that the more curveballs you encounter the closer to the top of this pyramid you will become. Self-doubt is a negative energy, being proactive is its positive cousin. Being ready to accept your fears and work through them is such a cathartic process, one you should feel excited about.