Do you remember when you first started to become afraid or nervous of things? What was the age when innocence left and the "real world" started to creep in? Everyone is apprehensive of something; the business world pushes that fear on you constantly. When did this start? This question jumped at me in the oddest of settings.
I was having lunch with my wife Cara, my mother-in-law, and my beautiful 19 month old daughter London. As any parent of a young child knows, when you go out to eat the clock is always ticking. You don’t know when your child is going to get bored and want to run around the restaurant but you know at some point…it’s going to happen! Well London decided to wait just until the time all our food was being brought out. Feeling ready for the challenge I volunteered for the first shift to allow everyone else to eat.
I picked London up and we proceeded to the lobster tank in the front lobby. She was fascinated. London loved the water, the bubbles, and the little red light on the side of the tank but even more she loved all the people giving her attention. When London saw all the people who were waiting for tables laughing, saying HI! to her, giving her high fives she was elated. My daughter, in front of about 20 total strangers worked the room! She danced, said hi/bye, laughed and pulled out all her cute tricks to get a rise out of her audience. She had no fear. She felt as though it was the right thing to do and her innocence allowed her to go through with it.
As I was smiling and laughing along with everyone else a thought crept into my mind. When did we lose this unabashed sense of “just do it”? When did fear start to tip-toe in to say, noooo you can’t do that, people will laugh at you, you’ll embarrass yourself and just a plain old STOP!
Now I am not naïve enough to believe that we all should be dancing and high fiving strangers in the lobby of a Red Lobster. What I am saying is that everyone needs to remember that unabashed adrenaline rush that happens when you put fear aside and go after something. So many people become paralyzed with fear that it dictates what they do in life and business. We cant let this happen!
In starting our new company Expivia Interaction Marketing, I was very nervous and fearful at the VERY beginning. While I have worked for and managed a company I had never started one. Fear ran though me every day (and still does to a certain extent), who will I get to believe in us and invest, what hardware and software platforms should we use, who should we hire first, where should we be located! A small list of things that I went to sleep thinking about ...if at times I even slept.
I promised myself though, after it was decided that this is what we were going to do, that I would not let fear have any say in the company's success or failure, especially in the beginning. I was going to be all in. If it did or did not happen it would not be because I was fearful of making, or just as importantly, NOT making a decision.
I came across a saying that you may have heard that states “Success is on the other side of FEAR”. That quote resonates with me on a very deep level. That quote got me though many uncomfortable lunches and phone conversations when I was trying to find investors. That quote got me thorough making tough decisions on the future of the company (which is still relatively young).
What I realized is that if you start to get through your fear it becomes a mindset. You will never fully conquer fear but you can get through it and in my case, I like to say I try to dominate it every day. The other feeling that drives me and those that I work with that relates to this is REGRET. Regret is a much more terrifying feeling that any type of fear. Embarrassment or failure go away as you continue on, regret lasts a lifetime.
Don’t let fear run your personal or business life, try different things, talk to different people, do things people tell you that you can’t, prove people wrong who put you down but most importantly prove to yourself that you will not run your life by being afraid.
So the next time fear starts to slow your progress and cloud what you want, think of London dancing around the lobby of Red Lobster. That brazen child is still in all of us! You just need to make him or her come out.
I was going end by saying that I hope this helps a little but that's not true...I hope this helps a lot!! I would love to hear stories on how some of you kept going when you were scared or fearful of doing something. Every great accomplishment happened because someone had the courage to fight through their fear!
If you need a little more motivation check this out. I read it every time someone tells me I can’t do something, laughs at an idea or wants to criticize.
