Seven ridiculous fears I had last month and how I kicked all their asses

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Spoiler alert: check me out on Fear, Exposed!

Fear is what keeps us from doing what we want. It keeps us paralyzed.

Why are we so afraid? For myself and probably anyone reading this, we have safe, cushy lives. Our chances of going hungry, being eaten by tigers, or falling off a cliff are vanishingly small. So are we happy? No, we get busy fearing smaller things instead. Even when the things we fear are excruciatingly tiny and ridiculous, the fear can still stop us if we let it.

Just to show you how stupid this can be, I’ll give you a list of things I was afraid of as recently as last week. Laugh if you want. Then I’ll tell you how I overcame them so you can try it.

1. Skype. (I’m serious.) I developed a “should already know this” complex about it. Then my boyfriend told me his mom, who is in her 80s, was already using it! How embarrassing would it be if I couldn’t get it working?!

   Now that I’ve tried Skype, I realize just how silly I was to be afraid of it. How did I get over it? I really wanted to talk to Lach from The Art of Audacity, and he lives in Thailand.

   Sometimes, if you want something badly enough, that’s all it takes, especially if the fear is small.

2. Talking to people. This explains some of my fear with Skype. I’m so introverted, I scored 100% introvert on Myers-Briggs.

   But what am I really afraid of? Most people are nice and want to help. This is not 9th grade–nobody is going to put a thumb tack on your chair, call you names, or make fun of you just for being you.

   Looking more closely, I realize that the two biggest fears I have with talking to people are that I won’t know what to say and that they’ll want something from me.

   If the conversation peters out, there are two easy solutions: end it, or ask a question about something that interests the other person. Done.

   If the other person wants something, you don’t have to say yes. If you know that, you have nothing to fear here. Make “let me think about it” or “no” your default response, and remember that you are not responsible for solving all the world’s problems. You’re free to say yes only to the things you really want to do. Once you realize that, you’re good to go.

   Sometimes breaking fears down and picking apart the things behind them is all it takes.

3. Failing at business. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve joined Jonathan Mead’s Six Month “Quit Your Job and Do What You Love” coaching program.

   I love the idea of supporting myself with my own business: being able to set my schedule, choose my projects, and spend most of my time doing work I love. However, the business part has always seemed like black magic.

   For this fear, getting help from someone who knows what he’s doing has been golden. We’ve worked together for about a month now, and he’s blown the cover off the grand mystery of how to build a successful business. He’s helped me define what I have to offer people, and he’s helped me see the things I need to do to make this work. He’s even given me a good order to do them in. Also, he acts like of course I can do this, why not?

   I think that attitude has rubbed off on me, because I’m no longer afraid I can’t make it happen.

   For fears that are big and nebulous like this one was, structure helps a lot, and advice and encouragement from someone who has been there is even better.

4. Guest posting on other people’s blogs. I’ve heard since before I even started this blog that guest posting is the best way to get the word out about your blog. I love what I’m doing here and think it’s valuable, so I want to reach as many people as I can, yet I never made a move. Why?

   Trying to get a guest post on someone’s blog combines many fears: talking to someone, possibly someone I don’t know; not knowing everything; asking for help; possibly being rejected; and possibly lacking that elusive coolness factor.

   I don’t know how long I would have waited to try this if Coach Jonathan hadn’t assigned me three guest post pitches in one week. I procrastinated my hardest, but when I found myself still alive the morning they were due, I knew I had to either do them, or let myself and him down. I wrote the pitches.

   I discovered two amazing things. Once I finished writing the pitches and sent them to Jonathan, I caught myself wondering expectantly if the recipients had responded yet. I hadn’t even sent the pitches to them.

   I was terrified of contacting these people, but once I took the time to think about what ideas might be a good fit for them, I shifted from fear to eagerness.

   Once I sent the pitches to the bloggers, I realized another thing: I was more afraid they’d say yes than no. (If they said yes, I had work to do, and what if it wasn’t good enough?)

   Suddenly I was seeing guest posting the same way as any other time I’ve submitted things for publication. Sometimes they get accepted, sometimes they get rejected. A rejection just means that particular idea or way of presenting it isn’t what those people need at this moment. Try the same people with a different idea, and send the same idea to other people. That’s it.

   Once you realize that’s the worst that can happen, there truly is no peril here. For irrational fears, defining the worst case scenario often dissipates the fear by making its foolishness obvious.

5. Modern web technology. I’ve known the web since its early days. Back then, I was on top of all the hot stuff. But I ended up doing other things, and 2011 found me knowing nothing about PHP, CSS, Ruby, e-commerce, Drupal, Joomla, et al.

   I hate admitting I don’t know stuff. The fear really boils down to inadequacy. Web stuff used to be my thing, plus I’m a PhD, so I think I should know everything.

   A comment on this blog broke the impasse. I mentioned this fear before, and one of my friends wrote that I don’t have to catch up on everything that’s happened in the last 15 years, just learn the current stuff!

   Whoa! Clearly, it’s true. It took me a while to act on it, but now, when I want to know how to do something, I pick up a book and start playing with it. Oh right, it’s just programming–I can do that.

   Sometimes, redefining the scope is what it takes. We don’t have to know everything, and once we learn a little, the whole thing loses the scary mystique of the unknown.

6. My project ending at work. I’ve had my ups and downs with my job, but overall, it’s treated me well, let’s not forget the money! On top of that, I’ve enjoyed the project I’ve been working on for the past year.

   That project is ending, so I’m nervous that I’ll be laid off. What if I can’t find another job?

   The budget where I work seems to be all right, though, and I’ve been doing a good job. That leaves worrying about being stuck on an awful new project. Even if it’s a great project, it will be different, and that alone is scary!

   For this one, I just had to wait it out. I got one new project, and although it involves a crapload of meetings and teleconferences (hate!), it seems to be pretty good work. In fact, I’m learning JSP, AJAX, Eclipse, Subversion, and two graph-drawing libraries, none of which I’ve used before.

   Normally, all that would scare the pants off me, but I’ve decided to adopt a growth mindset and be excited to learn all this new stuff. I’ve complained that my skills are out of date–here’s my chance to catch up on several things, and they’re going to pay me to do it!

   Sometimes, a change in attitude is what it takes to turn a fear into an opportunity.

7. Succeeding at business but going broke personally. Say the coaching works, and I achieve my dream of supporting myself and quit my job. Woohoo!

   But, that makes me a self-employed person, and everybody knows their finances are a mess! It’s all ups and downs. What if I can’t make ends meet?

   Luckily, I stumbled across a book about this, and it spelled out exactly what to do to make sure you have enough money to cover emergencies, pay your taxes, stay out of debt, and save for things like retirement, a new car, or a trip to Tahiti.

   There’s no need to have screwed up finances just because you work for yourself. If you get paid irregularly, use percentages instead of fixed dollar amounts per month. Each time you get paid, whether it’s $50 or $5000, immediately move appropriate percentages for taxes, retirement, and your emergency fund into special accounts for those things. If you’re saving for other big things, set up an account and a percentage for each one. If you have more than a month’s expenses left over, put it in a holding account so you won’t spend it all. Then it will be there for the next lean month.

   That’s it! It’s simple arithmetic. Obviously, if you don’t have enough money coming in month after month, you need to do something about that, but otherwise, there’s no reason a self-employed person should have worse finances than anyone else.

   In this case, identifying my faulty assumption and looking at the facts were enough to dispel the fear.

The good news, and the bad news, is we’re statistically more likely to die from sitting on our asses and eating too many french fries than of doing anything.

It’s easy to look at these fears and think “well, duh, those are nothing to be afraid of,” but almost everything we fear is like that. Shed a little light on it, start defining it and breaking it down, learn what’s really going on and what you need to know, and the fear often evaporates. It’s amazing.

If you want to feel a lot of this quickly, do a lot of interesting new challenges in a short time. The effect builds on itself, and it feels great.

Oh yeah, and about guest posting? I would have thought the one thing scarier than writing a guest post would be writing a guest post about my fears and weaknesses, especially on the blog of one of my major, super-successful heroes, but guess what? I did! It was surprisingly easy. Check it out–I think you’ll like it.