This is a time of year when I see a lot of fear.

My clients are running businesses and tend to think of things a year at a time.

As a new year approaches, they assess how they are doing this year and what they want to change for next year.

Our culture attributes special meaning to January 1 and we begin to think about the next one around October 1.

“Fourth quarter” is when we think about the goals we’ve not met, and the goals that we want to meet come “first quarter.”

A lot of people come to me because last year did not go as well as they wanted it to and because they want next year to be different. Because I work with people running businesses, and because I tend to work with people a year at a time, I have a lot hinging on this cycle even as I work with them to break it.

I end up feeling the fear, too.

The cycle may be somewhat arbitrary, but the fear behind the cycle is very human.

Three Types of Fear

While fear shows up in a lot of different ways, the three most common ones I see with business leaders are the following—

Fear of Uncertainty

Leading a business, even if that business is just you for the time being, is full of uncertainty.

Full of decisions that have no easy answers, and paths that only reveal themselves a little at a time.

What humans crave is certainty, predictability. We are genetically programmed to seek safety. I think this is why most people work for someone else. They know they don’t know the answers, but hope that someone else does. And (see below) they’re not willing to take the risk of being wrong.

In fact, most people will not start something new until they feel sure of the result. And thus most people find it very hard to change.

Fear of Failure

Related to the fear of uncertainty is the fear of failure.

It seems obvious that we are afraid of trying something new and failing at it. We might feel foolish, people might laugh at us, there might be economic consequences.

Failing at some things might even mean that we or people we employ could lose their jobs.

It’s one thing to feel the fear and do it anyway. But a lot of people want to avoid even feeling fear.

So they avoid taking risks in the first place.

Yes. This means that the fear of failure actually contributes to lack of success. That fear of failure can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If I never apply to my dream job, I will never know if I would have gotten it. If I could have succeed at it.

If I never go into business for myself, I will never find out if I could have done it.

The phrase, “it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all,” was likely written by someone trying to talk themselves out of the fear of failure.

Our fear of failure might keep us physically alive, but it might also keep us spiritually dead.

Because it keeps us from pursuing our dreams.

Fear of Success

So if people are afraid of failing, they must be eager to succeed, right?

Not so fast.

Remember that mostly we fear uncertainty. So it’s really hard to take a risk, even if it appears likely to succeed.

But another thing that gets in the way of success is the stories that people tell themselves about success.

About what it means, to them and to others.

Maybe successful people never see their families.

Maybe successful people are selfish and exploit others.

Maybe successful people become famous and lose their privacy.

You can try this yourself—just journal with the sentence “Successful people are…” and see what are the first few things that come to mind.

If the first few things are bad things, things you would never want, you have a fear of success.

Unless you are willing to consciously let go of what is called an “upper limit,” you will never be successful.

You will never let yourself be.

How Fear Has Served You

Remember that from an evolutionary perspective, small is safe. Safe is alive. Alive is what brought you here.

The fact that your ancestors were afraid is the very reason that your parents survived to give birth to you.

Humans are pack animals. Watch pack animals in the wild. The ones at the edges get killed.

Stand out, in a bad way or a good way, at your own risk.

How Fear Gets In Your Way

If your job or your business is completely fulfilling, congratulations.

But if you are a human being, you are drawn to grow, to test yourself, to create. To learn and try new things.

You will want this your entire life. It is another, essential part of genetic code.

A paradox—when you look at the amazing things a small number of people have been able to do, even while most are afraid of acting.

When you see opportunities, does fear keeps you from acting on them? The fear of failure runs deep. Failure used to mean getting kicked out of the tribe. About being on your own with predators all around you. Taking risks wasn’t about money or reputation. It was about life and death.

But staying small has created some big problems. Politically, economically, environmentally. We can see a day where if we don’t change we might not even survive.

Life is asking us, requiring us, to make BIG changes. Staying small and doing what we have always done no longer feels like it is enough.

At times it can feel like we will not survive UNLESS we take risks.

A different kind of person is called for. A different kind of leader.

Are you one of the people who will answer the call?

How To Go Deeper

If you are reading this, you are different, or at least you want to be.

You are willing to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Most people shake their fists at life when it does not turn out as they want, rather than work with what life is actually giving them.

You accept your role as a co-creator of your life. Yes, you still stop yourself from time to time. It is hard to completely overcome our genetic programming. But you are miles ahead of those who refuse to see it.

There are others like you, and I work with and hope to inspire them, just as others have inspired me.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

I got an email from a coach whose work I mostly really like.

And it was about his top ten favorite high-performance habits.

I had a reaction to this. Not because there is anything wrong with high performance. But because of the cultural narrative, we have built around high performance. The story we have created is that, if you get more done, if you are more productive, if you meet the goal on the other side of them, you will be happy.

I could not disagree more.

How High Performance Gets It Backwards

If you are able to look at the assumptions in the high performance game, they go something like this—

1. There is something fundamentally wrong with me.
2. I can achieve my way out of it.

In other words, there is some big goal that, if I meet it, I will feel better. Or I will “arrive.”

Maybe it’s a degree, or a job title, or a house in the right place, or a second house in the right place.

I tried to achieve my way into feeling okay about myself for decades.

It doesn’t work.

Because there is always more to do. There is always a goal behind the goal, another mountain to climb or race to run, or another digit to add to the exit.

So when the first goal doesn’t get there, certainly it’s because the goal wasn’t big enough, right?

It took me about 30 years to learn the goal wasn’t the issue.

The Only Thing You Have To See To Be Happy

Meeting a goal will never make you happy (for more than a few fleeting moments, anyway).

Your entire experience of the world is happening inside your brain. Based on what your senses tell you, true, but more important than that, based on the stories you tell yourself about what your senses tell you.

You are living in your stories about the world. And most of them are unconscious.

If you are writing the story, why are you writing it to make yourself miserable?

What Stories Do You Believe About Yourself and Your World?

The coach I’m referring to told me that he had never seen anyone build a million dollar business without a lot of hard work.

But I see it all the time. Enough that I make it a goal for people. To make as much income as you can with as little work as possible.

If you have believed different ideas you are not even going to see this as a possibility.

If your rules require struggle to make money, for example, you are going to struggle to make money.

If your rules require productivity or efficiency or exhaustion, you are not going to let yourself be happy or fulfilled without them. You need to be miserable to be happy.

Each of your rules is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And you can let each of them go.

If you see that you must already be enough (that you can’t NOT be enough) because you are the one creating your experience of being enough, or not enough, you are going to set different goals.

What Do You Really Want?

What do you WANT when you see you don’t actually NEED anything?

When creating can be from a sense of play rather than lack?

What will you create just because it is deliriously FUN to do it?

That’s what the high performance culture says is not possible.

But to me, that’s the place where our capacity to create gets most powerful.

How To Go Deeper

You can be happy without being exhausted.

What would that be like? To fully embrace you and THEN create, rather than thinking you have to create to someone FIX yourself?

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the intersection between our financial success and our capacity and willingness to be ourselves.

There is a connection that occurs between humans that deepens as each is willing to be more and more vulnerable, real, themselves.

I believe that, especially as we get into longer-term relationships with each other—whether that is as provider and client or as employer and employee, this capacity to know and trust deepens and enhances what we are able to create with each other.

And not so coincidentally, I believe that this is what we most want—that we want to fully express our unique selves and find the people who will accept and appreciate and even love us for those selves.

Even the parts of us that we regard as flaws and try to hide.

But I got a question recently that stopped me in my tracks—

This sounds simple. But what does it mean to “just be yourself”? And why does it feel so difficult?

A Simple Answer to a Hard Question

The simple answer to this doesn’t sound very satisfying. You are yourself when you are honest about who you are and what you believe. When you speak as and from your truth.

I confess that there are an awful lot of times when I do not feel fully myself. This feels like a goal, an aspiration, but it can feel like true authenticity is a long way off. I do better when I am writing—there is something about the psychological distance between me and my readers—than I do with one-on-one in real-life interactions.

It can feel really hard to “be myself,” to “own my truth.”

Why?

For me, I notice a few things.

First, I really want people to like me and when I say something that they might not agree with, I risk that.

Of course, when I hide something with the goal of them liking me, they are not really liking “me,” they are liking me with some kind of veneer or mask.

Second, I have a lot of history around feeling like my interests are weird, and I learned to hide them. I’ve told the story of how, walking out of the original “Star Wars” with my parents when I was 12, feeling like I had had a life-changing experience, my mom looked at me and said, “Jeff, if you liked that, you’re weird.”

That was the story of my life—if I liked it, it was weird.

For decades I hid that rather than embraced it. And I and my friendships suffered for it.

Third, I was afraid that if I said what I really thought, I might hurt people.

A More Satisfying Direction to Look

I was talking with a coach friend about this—he was really interested in how I might answer the question and I confess I hadn’t given it much thought. But it occurred to me that I might be useful to try to define this.

The first thing that occurred to me is that if I don’t say something because I am afraid of what you might think of me if I do, that is not being myself.

There are some things that I am afraid to say because I am afraid that if I say them you might judge me in some way.

Disclosing some “weird” interest or hobby, for example.

I remember when I started going on retreats I would actively avoid talking about them. When I was on retreat, a lot of the people there were therapists or healers. I didn’t run into many lawyers and consultants and business people.

So I would avoid talking about my work when I was on retreat, and I would avoid talking about my retreats when I was back at work.

But what I discovered when I did begin to talk about those things is that there was a small number of people who appreciated the combination. That the fact that I was interested in both of those things made me more interesting to those people. That I had deeper relationships with these people, and that I would not have without that uncomfortable disclosure.

Years later, embracing those interests made me a more powerful coach, and helped my ideal clients find me.

On the other hand, there are times when I don’t say something just because I don’t want to hurt them. It might or might not be helpful for them to hear it in some way, but the relationship is not such where it can withstand my saying it.

The vast majority of the time, that simply means that it is none of my business. We do not have a relationship where my disclosure is helpful or appropriate and I will not disclose it.

But in other cases, some level of disclosure is helpful and even necessary.

For example, am I protecting a boundary? If so, I need to disclose. I need to declare, for example, if I think the other person did something that violated a boundary for me. Of course I need to do this in an appropriate way and that is a deep and detailed inquiry in and of itself. But “being myself” and “protecting myself” overlap and it’s important to honor that.

In another case, I might be invested in a long-term relationship with this person. Are they my partner, or a key employee? If so, there are things I need to say for the sake of the relationship, or in the case of an employee, for their development and performance, and it would be neglectful for me NOT to say something.

How Being Yourself Creates Psychological Safety

When we disclose something that feels a bit vulnerable, we begin to create some sense of psychological safety. It becomes easier for the person in front of us to disclose something unusual about them. We become closer because of these. We trust each other more. And we are more likely to enter a long term relationship, either person or business.

Being ourselves FEELS dangerous. But it benefits everyone.

Sometimes the first step is to create that safely within ourselves. To admit to ourselves things that we have not admitted. About what we really want, for example, or what we are really good at.

Try it. See if the other person opens up to you. And see what you both can create from that.

Having a Deeper Conversation

I am dedicated to the idea that all you ever need or want to be is YOU.

You with all your gifts. And all the things you instinctively hide, too.

What would that be like? To fully embrace you and THEN create, rather than thinking you have to create to someone FIX yourself?

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

 

I had a recent health scare (a recurring prostate issue) that landed me in an ER in the middle of Iowa early on a Sunday morning.

I knew the drill—that I was going to be wearing a catheter for a week or so, and that my upcoming visit to my 87-year-old Mom’s was going to be impacted.

I thought I was past these issues—they go back to 2019, to a surgery in 2020, and I really thought I was done with them for a few years. It was frustrating and scary.

As I was panicking (when you can’t pee, but really need to, you panic a lot), I was noticing a lot of thoughts.

While I was pacing in my room at 2 am, I was noticing a lot of thoughts.

When I was thinking about how soon would be too soon to wake and ask my host to drive me to the ER, I was noticing a lot of thoughts.

We Tend to Think That Life is Happening TO Us

The thoughts that I was having were things like this—

Why did this happen AGAIN?

Shouldn’t my doctor have warned me?

Should I tell my mom? Will she worry too much if I do?

And mainly—

WHY ME???

Most of the time, life looks like it’s outside of us and happening TO us.

This is an illusion.

When we believe the illusion, we feel helpless. Especially when bad or difficult things happen.

I think that there must have been something that I could have done to avoid it.

I feel bad about myself.

I feel like I am being a burden and that people don’t want to help me.

What is Life, Actually?

But what if it didn’t have to look like this?

Questioning what your life is, and who you are, is the first step toward making a GIANT change on how you approach things.

How you feel about your life and what is happening in it.

First, notice one thing—

You are never directly experiencing anything outside of yourself. You can’t.

You are only experiencing two things—

First, whatever your sense organs and brain tell you about what is going on, both inside and outside your body.

Second, whatever stories you tell yourself about those sensations—whether they are good or bad, whether you like them or not, whether or not in your view they “should” be happening.

All of this is happening in your mind. Only in your mind.

So, from that perspective, your experience of life is always and only internal.

Always and only a model of your life that you are creating. It is never the “real” world, the “true” reality. We are not capable of experiencing that. Ever.

Most of us are not aware of this.

And even when we are, most of us create most of our experience of life unconsciously.

But consciously or unconsciously, we are always creating.

And when we see this, we can choose to create our experience differently.

One way, a highly leveraged way, is to look at what assumptions we make about life itself.

What if Life is Happening For You?

If I assume life is “out there,” happening “to me,” that leads me to other assumptions that may or may not be true—

That I am a victim.

That my problems are caused by “other people.”

That I have little or no control over most of the aspects of my life.

But what if I experiment with a different assumption? What if I experiment with the idea that life is happening FOR me?

What assumptions does that bring?

That there is something bigger than me that is looking out for me, that is presenting lessons for me, that is in some larger sense, taking care of me.

That there is a plan, even if I don’t understand in every moment what the plan is.

I want to be clear. I DO NOT KNOW if either if these assumptions—that life is is happening to me or for me—is true.

But what I do know is that when I look for that level of care, for the teaching, for the lessons, and for the gentle way in which they are presented, I can easily find them.

Take my medical emergency.

Yes, it is easy to think WHY ME? WHY NOW?

But had it happened at any other time or in any other place it could have been a lot more difficult.

I was with a friend, rather than at my mom’s (I would have had to call an ambulance there, and she would have completely panicked).

I was at a small town ER on a Sunday morning. I was literally the only patient there. Talk about feeling cared for by life.

I had already blocked a week off my calendar, other than a few calls. And I was with my 87-year-old mom, where life is already very slow. I could not have been better prepared to have a week of limited mobility.

After getting the catheter out, and talking with my urologist, I am now more prepared for future occurrences, without really suffering any more than was needed. The only suffering that I really had was my hesitation to wake my friend in the middle of the night. And that was my choice.

I have learned, again, that despite my constant hesitation to ask, that I can rely on people and that they want to help me.

Just that is a tremendous gift.

What Would It Mean To You To See This?

This week, take a look at some of the difficulties in your life. The things that you say you didn’t want, or that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.

A personal health crisis. The illness or death of someone close to you. A chronic challenge.

What was the learning? What was the gift? What was the blessing? What was it that you could not have learned in any other way?

Want To Go Deeper In This Conversation?

I am dedicated to the idea that all you ever need or want to be is YOU.

You with all your gifts. And all the things you instinctively hide, too.

What would that be like? To fully embrace you and THEN create, rather than thinking you have to create to someone FIX yourself?

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.