Point Your Compass in the Direction of Fear

Today we’re discussing why and how to point your compass in the direction of fear. I interpret this phrase to mean when things scare me when I feel anxious in my stomach like I don’t want to do this; it’s an excellent indicator of what I should be doing. Because the easy things, at least for me, often aren’t the things that make the most significant impact. Instead, the things that make an impact, such as sales, engaging in new social media platforms, submitting a proposal or other new and exciting activities that I’m not sure I’ll be successful at, are scary but precisely what I need to do to grow.

When you’re a service-based business, it’s important to lean into new experiences that may seem scary. You may feel like success or failure solely relies on you, the individual. When things go well, you may think, “Yay, I’m great.” Conversely, when things go poorly, you think, “Wow, I’m terrible; I suck.” This conflation of our personal selves with who we are in business is typical but something essential to be aware of because that can stop us from doing the most critical work in our business.

How I Overcame Fear and Founded a New Business

For example, back in 2017, I wrote an article called “What Financial Coaching is and How to Start Your Own Business.” I wrote it for a financial planning blog that had about 20,000 unique monthly subscribers at the time. When I was writing the blog post, it ended up being about 14,000 words. And as I was writing it, I thought, “who the hell am I to be writing this? Who am I, with only two years of experience, on my journey to be telling people how to start a firm?” I realized that by leaning into that fear, I didn’t have to pretend like I had all the answers or that I had it all figured out. I simply wrote how to start your own firm using my experience. By leaning into my fears, using my own experiences and not pretending to have all the answers, it was easier to write the blog post.

The cool thing about the experiences is that although I was extremely scared, worried, and questioned myself, the article led to a second business called Financial Coaches Network. We help financial coaches build and run successful coaching businesses. As a result of the publication of that article, people started reaching out via email wanting to pick my brain. Eventually, enough people started reaching out that I thought, “I can’t do this just one on one; I want to start a group so people can connect.” Thus the Financial Coaches Community Facebook group was formed and now there are over 4600 coaches in that group. The group led to someone reaching out and wanting to co-found Financial Coaches Network.

So that was a long story, a little focused on myself. Still, I share that because those scary tasks we tend to want to shy away from, lead to awesome opportunities if we lean into that discomfort, our authenticity and show up in a way that genuinely feels good for us. In my experience, that’s how we can connect with more humans (potential customers), and enjoy the best part of being a business owner.

I hope you found a reason to point your compass in the direction of fear. And if you have any questions or thoughts or comments, I’d love for you to go ahead and put them in the comments below!

This post was adapted from an episode of the Fireside Financials series. If you’d like to check out the video, you can watch it here!