6 Steps to Overcome Your Fears
Your fears are holding you back from maximising your potential in business and life. In most cases, fear is the reason you haven’t achieved your goals.
We all experience fear. In fact, the emotion of fear is designed to protect you and keep you safe. At the highest level, fears fall into two categories, danger and irrational or illogical fear.
Danger applies when you’re in genuine danger, therefore you want the emotion of fear to kick in and keep you safe. For example, you might have a car hurtling towards you or you’re being chased by an animal.
Where the fear has gone wrong is around irrational or illogical fear, ie. the fear of public speaking, making a sales call, or having a difficult employee conversation. Are you ‘really’ in danger when you’re in these situations? No, of course not. Yet we’ve created this danger in our mind and hence the emotion of fear takes over, preventing us from taking action.
Here are six steps that my clients and I use to overcome fear:
1) Isolate the fear.
What is the fear? Is it a fear of failure or perhaps the fear of being criticised by other people?
2) Seek the source of this fear.
Where has the fear originated from? It could be from your parents, teachers, friends, past experiences, the news, and so on.
3) Recognise that fear is not true.
Fear is also known as a limiting belief, and beliefs are representations in our minds. They are things that we make up regardless if they are true or not. In fact, in the middle of the word belief is the word L-I-E.
4) Start forming empowering beliefs.
As I just mentioned, beliefs are representations in our mind, therefore if we’re going to make something up, why not make it empowering and positive. The opposite of fear is love, therefore instead of saying you have a fear of public speaking, why not say that you love public speaking. Instead of fearing sales calls, what about telling yourself that you love doing sales calls?
5) Start acting ‘as-if’.
Start assuming that you’re already doing the thing you are fearful of. This is also about changing how you identify with yourself. Start behaving like the person who is doing what you want to do. What does a successful business person do? How do they behave? What do they say? This does not happen instantaneously, but you must start.
6) Create evidence of success.
This is achieved in one of two ways: a) Start small. Have some success with the process, reward yourself, then do it again; and b) Transfer your skills. Remind yourself of a time when you did have success doing something else. You already possess the blueprint and capability, therefore you just need to apply that mindset to the new task that you want to accomplish.
Fear is part of being a human, but it’s about harnessing your strength and courage to overcome fear. You’ll never eliminate fear, but you can definitely overcome it and achieve phenomenal success in your business by following these six steps.
Contact the team at Tony Meredith Coaching. Specialists in individual business coaching, group business coaching and online business coaching.
Bio of Tony Meredith
Tony Meredith, Director and Head Coach at Tony Meredith Coaching, has over 25 years’ experience working for some of the world’s largest corporations in a variety of senior sales and leadership roles.
Tony Meredith Coaching started in 2018 and works with hundreds of small-medium businesses across Australia, in the areas of Franchising, Retail, Services, Manufacturing, and Property. Tony Meredith Coaching focuses on helping business owners Grow Sales, Increase Profits, and Regain Time.
