Wow. It's been a month since I've written. I hadn't thought it was quite that long, but then my memory isn't what it once was!
Christmas season is one of my favorite times of the year, but it is stressful, and this year it's been full of pivots. Some of them I'm still pivoting, and others I'm hopeful will stick for a while. It was a month full of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
This is an important part of leadership, and especially leading your life, but it's something I find hard to embrace. Some kinds of fear are easily pushed aside- wow, that deadlift looks really hard- I've never lifted over 200 pounds before, but BOOM look at that, I did it!- and we get a thrill from moving past the fear into success.
Other times, it's much harder. Spend money on advertising?? What are you talking about? I don't HAVE any money for advertising- and what if it fails? Yeah, that was me the entire month of December. I was completely filled with fear because... what if??? December was a month of "What If It Fails".
But I felt the fear and did it anyway. Sometimes I moved slowly, but I took action and Did the Thing.
And here is the best part. I don't feel like a failure. I feel like I learned something valuable. I learned what doesn't work. I learned what I'm offering is valuable. I learned people are interested. I learned advertising has to target the right market or you get no interaction, and I learned it must be written in a way that draws in people you want to work with to be successful. I found support and encouragement and people to come along side me.
So my "What If It Fails" was pretty successful, even if it wasn't the success I wanted.
But that's what fear does, it keeps us from the success we might have had, because we are paralyzed by the fear. Maybe not in a panic-attack paralyzed way- certainly I wasn't panicking- but my fear was very rational- the kind of fear borne of long-established thinking patterns I didn't even think to question until just the last year. Thank goodness I finally did!
There are exciting things coming to CLI this month, and even bigger things this year. I am so excited to see what happens next!
Talk to you soon!
Sarah
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