Escaping the Fear Trap
It’s 10 o’clock on a Monday night. You’re sitting on your couch, watching TV, trying to get some distance from your Monday Blues. You pick up your phone and start scrolling.
Maybe you start with Facebook. Or Instagram. Perhaps you open up Medium. No matter your poison, you’re immediately bombarded with what feels like endless amounts of success…bursting out of everyone else, but you.
Jenny just got a promotion. Greg just graduated from law school. Your ex-boyfriend just got married. The 5x entrepreneur you follow has just launched a new venture. Your favorite fashion blogger is in Greece, on your dream vacation, sporting a handbag you’ll never be able to afford. The yogi with the perfect body just landed a pose with so much elegance and ease, you can’t help but pause and ask yourself:
“Why not me?”
At some point or another, we’ve all been there, sitting on the couch (probably covered in cookie crumbs), feeling overcome with a combination of jealously and guilt that makes us feel less inspired, and more paralyzed with fear.
Fear like, “what if I never do anything important with my life?” and “this person is so amazing…how can I ever measure up?” or “how did they just know to go this route? How come I don’t know?”
It can sometimes feel like these platforms and people were designed merely to make us feel badly about our lives. Like if we’re not, at 30, running our own companies, quitting our jobs and getting paid to document our lives, we’re just fucking failures.
In my own life, I feel this way quite often. My own fear is a combination of longing to be in the place of those I admire, but also sometimes feeling like I just don’t know where to begin. I have so many passions, how can I choose just one thing and be really, really good at it? How can I be better than them?
But you know, wallowing is not really my style.
So instead of spending every evening relentlessly searching through my Instagram feed, liking posts like a tortured masochist, I decided to change my thinking and approach, putting more of an emphasis on planning, and less on feeling paralyzed.
(Try) not getting paralyzed by other’s success
This is a tough one because it’s so easy to get sucked into the same old, “I could never do that, so why bother?” track, but you’ve gotta shut that voice up and stay focused.
Try to remember that, at one point or another, all of the people you admire had zero followers, lackluster content skills and no direction. We all start somewhere, and you’re no different.
Also, one person’s definition of success does not have to equal yours. Dare to define success for yourself, whether that’s crossing something big off your goal list, getting a new job, or gaining 500 followers on Medium — the ball is totally in your court.
Whatever you choose, be happy for yourself when you succeed, instead of focusing on the fact that you don’t “measure up” to someone else who has nothing to do with you or what you’re doing.
We are all unique individuals who have something special to offer this world, so forge your own path, instead of following the breadcrumbs of someone else's.
Don’t stop moving forward
Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing yoga certification. But when it came time to actually commit to the 3–4 months of rigorous, non-stop, expensive training, I started to balk.
“I can always do it next year,” I told my boyfriend, making excuses for something that is actually really important to me.
What I realized is, stopping myself from doing the things I’m passionate about is only thwarting my future success. If you stop for a moment and think about how you’ve gotten to where you are in your life, did you get there because you said, “no” to a lot of things, or because you said, “yes”?
Everything we do, from our jobs to our passion projects, is connected. If your life is an ocean, it was built through the force of many streams, flowing separately, but in the same direction toward one common goal.
Every experience is drawing you closer to discovering your purpose in life, so if you want to succeed, don’t stop. Do everything you can to expand your potential because creation doesn’t start until inspiration strikes. Maybe you don’t know your purpose, because you simply haven’t experienced it yet.
Create some focus around your many passions
Are you someone who has so many interests and passions that it feels like you have to choose one thing and run with it because, let’s be real, how will you ever do it all?
That’s the definition of my life. And it kills me everyday.
I want to be a good copywriter and have a successful freelance business; I want to be an author and write children’s books (to start!); I want to become certified in yoga, so I can teach or open my own studio; I love cooking so much, I want to run a successful food blog, write a cookbook, open a bar that serves food…my list not only feels like it goes on forever, but like I’ll never have enough time to do everything I want.
Recently, I looked at my “2016 goals” list and realized it was a complete mess. Unlike my semi-structured life as a freelancer, there were no priorities, timelines or due dates for any of my goals. How could I expect to achieve anything when I had absolutely zero plan for executing?
So, I made a list of everything, short-term and long-term, that I want to achieve. I then created a Google Doc spreadsheet where I listed all of my goals and prioritized them based on things like relevance, available resources, the time investment involved…etc.
This is slightly embarrassing to share, but I want people to know that achieving your goals (no matter how big or small) is merely a game of planning against the resources you have available, like time, energy, dollar investment, etc.
For me, I realized that focusing, at least right now, on my business was more important than yoga certification, for example. Does that mean I’ll never do the certification? Of course not! It just means that I’m allowing myself to stay focused on one goal at a time, so I can actually get things done and create more time and resources for everything else on my list.
This exercise is super easy and anyone can do it.
It’s a great tool to keep on hand as a way to help you stay on task, but it’s also really helpful to just see all of the things you’re working toward in one place. It kind of makes this whole “achieving my goals and ultimate success” thing seem as simple as checking things off a list.
Create incentives for yourself
It’s easy to reward yourself for a “job well done,” like after a presentation, with a round of drinks. People on your team are patting you on the back, telling you “congratulations” and “good job!”…it feels great, right?
So, why shouldn’t you apply that same reward structure for achieving goals that are important to you?
For me, I do things like give myself the day off if I worked overtime on finishing up one of my projects, splurge on something that I really want, or go away for a weekend to give my brain a little time off.
For most of us, there’s no team around who’s going to push and encourage us toward our goals. It’s up to us to not only define what our goals are, but figure out ways that will help us achieve them, whether through excel sheets or incentives and rewards.
Don’t beat yourself up when you don’t follow through
You know that list I showed you earlier? I think I’ve crossed off maybe one or two of those things and it wasn’t by the due date.
But that’s totally fine. And I certainly don’t beat myself up over “being late” or “lazy” — hell, I’m just happy those items aren’t on my list anymore, so I don’t care what I had to do or how long it took, I got that shit done and I’m ready to move on to the next thing.
Be kind to yourself and try to enjoy the ride. Every decision you make will lead you somewhere, even if it’s not on your list today.
Annie is a New York-based product copywriter who works exclusively with startups and small businesses. Have a question? annie1maguire@gmail.com
