Most Common Fears for Working Women:
**Outside of physical harm**
1. Their employers – Example: Fear of their judgement, expectations, disappointment, being fired.
2. Other Women – Example: Fear of being ostracized, judged, shamed for success, shamed for lack of success,
3. Achieving Success – Example: Fear of being in the spotlight, too seen, undeserving or falling from success
4. Themselves – Example: Fear of acknowledging dreams or desires, failure after chasing the dream, attaining the dream, their own abilities.
Which of These Fears Resonates with You?
Bravest Thing I Have Ever Done:
To understand what I had to overcome, you must know my fears. I’m a 5 in my Enneagram. Every action I take is to avoid the things I fear.
Here’s what I fear in one simple word: scarcity.
- I act to protect what little I already have vs wanting more. Example: I get energy by being alone or at peace. I know I have ‘x’ amount of time in my day to get that time and I am very protective of it.
- I hate asking for help because I need to learn how to do it in case one time there isn’t any help.
- I avoid buying furniture that I can’t move alone.
- I’m very scared of not having the right knowledge do things independently.
- I’m not likely to call someone to fix the toilet, I’ll google the hell out of it instead.
If you don’t know, this is what it takes to start a company:
- Money
- Time
- Help from others
- Having others rely on you
EVERY ONE OF MY BIGGEST CORE FEARS.
But, despite these fears, there was one thing I wanted very badly. Every time I thought about my daughter, I wanted her journey of having a career and motherhood to be different. I didn’t want her to have to make a choice, I wanted her to have it all.
How I Overcame:
1.I acknowledged my fear: Your body doesn’t know the difference between rational fears and irrational ones. Your physiological responses are the same. Take away some of the fear’s power by choosing to see it, define the fear with specifics and deal with the root cause.
2. I asked it what it was trying to tell me – The fears are self-preservation. Yes, even the irrational ones are only trying to protect you. Ask your fear what it is trying to teach you, stop, and listen for the answer. If you want to get a little advanced, write it down and you’ll start to see patterns emerge that you can address. My fear was of being the sole responsible person for a company and risking my financial safety net. Thinking through the why of these very rational fears helped me
Ask yourself:
“What’s the worst that can happen?”
“What can you do to minimize the chances of it happening?”
“How will you move on if it does?”
3. I took one step into my fears every day – Make a daily practice of taking a small, bold step into what you fear. Take control and defy it. Small wins build your confidence, and several small wins result in big accomplishments.
“We live in a culture and society that focuses on results and accomplishments and devalues the process and the journey. However, the true learnings happen not when everything goes well, but rather when we are taking risks, making mistakes, and learn from them.” – Anonymous
How to Name It to Tame It – What We Are All Here For:
1. Identify something you want to achieve. What are your deepest desires and greatest dreams? Take some time to think of the life you want to pursue.
2. Assess the potential risks. Once you’ve identified your goals, determine the risks that you might face if you venture forward toward these goals. What do these risks look like? Think about any potential risks in relation to your goals and then write them down next to the goals you identified in step one.
If we look at the previous example, these risks could look something like this:
I want to launch my new business venture by the end of the year, but… What if people lose interest in what I have to offer? What if my competition excels and overtakes us? What if there’s a decline in the economy and we enter a recession? What if I put all my energy into business growth and begin slacking in other areas of my life?
3. Think about the impact of each potential risk. Write down your goals and attach a risk assessment to each of them. The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate what is worth giving our energy to and what is best to avoid.
4. Assign each risk a value. Move through your list of goals and associated risks and give each of them a rating that indicates the severity of each risk. Use a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 having the highest impact and 1 having the lowest impact.
5. Make a plan. Based on the numbers you assigned to each risk, determine which risks are worth taking and which risks you can ignore.
Example:
| Goal | Fear | Risk | Plan |
| Get a job in social media | My salary will drop because I don’t have much experience. | 5 | I will take some training courses to build up my experience and find freelance work to build up my portfolio. I will have to cut X,Y,Z from the budget for 2 years while I build up my fee. |
Marianne Williamson: ‘… as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same.’”