Sometimes when I work with clients, I hear them say, “I’m so afraid to do that because of fear of failure!”

I question, “Are you SURE it’s the fear of failure?”

“Oh, yes,” they say. “It definitely is.”

Often their fear is not really of failure – their chart shows that their fear is of ‘Success’ and what that would mean to them! With a few constructed sentences I lead them to see they don’t have a fear of failure at all!

The worry of success sometimes comes with: “What will my family or friends think of me if I were to move past them in success? How would they view me if I were to open an amazingly successful business? Would they still love me? Would they still accept me for my humble self that I want them to see me as?”

Or sometimes the fear of success comes with: “How would I manage that? How would I be able to grow like that?”

One of the things I have learned is that we are not meant to know everything! We truly cannot be ALL things to all people. It’s often the parts we don’t know that truly stump us and keep us stuck.

Let’s assume you have an amazing sewing business! You can make things like nobody else has that craft but you don’t truly know how to get it off the ground. You are an amazing sewist… but terrible at social media. And let’s be real here – it is a complete fallacy when people say: “Build it and they will come.” No! No! No! They won’t come IF they don’t know you are there. Hence the need for marketing. And the focus then is not on success… it’s moved into the realm of failure.

Again, I say: YOU are the sewist, NOT the marketer. We cannot be ALL things to all people. What does that mean? It means you have to ask yourself a few questions, such as how big do you want to grow. Think BIG here – don’t box yourself in! Don’t ALLOW that fear of success to engulf you to keep you stuck!

Our mindset is what keeps us ‘small’ in all parts of the world.

What we send out there is EXACTLY what we get back! What are you manifesting?

I remember a long time ago, listening to a podcast by Dr. Norm Shealy. He was talking about this exact subject and saying that we should farm out the parts of our business we truly don’t know anything about and focus exactly on what it is that we DO know. If we are trying to stumble along, doing work for which we have no training and experience, it takes our focus away from what exactly it is that we are good at. BUT we can’t get to it, to make our money, because we are bumbling along spending too much time on things that should never be in our focus! This leads me back to our fear of success which ALLOWS our focus to go elsewhere so we don’t become too successful!

Remember we are EACH the magician in our own world.

We are the alchemists of our own lives. Just as an alchemist turns base metals into gold, we can do the same thing. But often we ALLOW our fears to create a stumbling block – that way we can self-sabotage and still be able to say, “But I was trying my best…”

Take a moment and be honest with yourself. What truly is holding you back in your life from the success you deserve? Let’s build more mouse traps – there is always one waiting to be discovered!