Last time, I asked you guys to share some of the fears that you have. The responses were not surprising to me, but the number of you that responded was surprising to me. So let’s talk about those fears. I summarized all of the fears that you guys wrote for me in the last video into 4 basic fears by breaking them down. The first one, which I think that I saw the most was the Fear of Failure. So, “I’m going to fail,” “My investment is going to go away.” I saw that most of you who said something like this, the fear was based around money. “I’m going to lose some money.”
If you get angry at what I’m saying about how to get over this, I challenge you to stop and ask yourself why you’re getting angry at what I’m saying. I challenge you guys to change your mindset and be open to what I’m going to say.
So lets talk about the fear of failure. Specifically tying it back to money. So: Your money doesn’t matter. Those of you who are afraid of losing your investment and having to file bankruptcy and stuff like that: your money is pointless. Your money is stupid and you worrying about it is just as pointless and just as stupid. Now that I’ve offended you, hopefully I’ve got your attention. Let’s talk about why.
Money is a means to something else. We didn’t start our businesses for money. Yes the goal is to make money and we need money for a lot of things and it’s important in almost every aspect of our lives, but it is not the end goal or the end all be all of what we’re doing. All of who are entrepreneurs didn’t start this to make a lot of money. You started your business for something else. The money allows you to execute that something else whatever that is. If you don’t know what your own why is, then why are you starting a business? Reverse yourself back a few steps and ask yourself “Why am I doing this?” The Why you come up with is the reason you need the money.
The thing that people always get wrong is this: Money can be made again. We can earn it. Worst case, your business bombs and you lose your investment and you file bankruptcy. Not just going to say hey everything going to be fine. It’s going to suck. But you’ll get through that. You can always go get another job and recover. It won’t be easy but you can. What you can’t recover from is if you let your why go. If staying where you are at right now instead of executing your Why, you cannot recover from that. If can’t recover or earn back your why. If you don’t do your Why then no one else is going to or can help you. Your Why will always get you to your money faster.
I can go get more money by making some sacrifices if I have to, but you can’t get your why back. You can never recover from losing your Why. It drives who you are and what you do continuously. That’s why money is irrelevant and who cares if you lose it. This will probably piss a bunch of you off.
That’s number one. Money is irrelevant, your why is what matters. Don’t be afraid of failure. That’s fear number one.
Number two ties into fear of success. This came from many of you in real estate. For many of you the fear was “what if I get a deal?” What if you do? What if you made 20 thousand dollars. What if your why became something that you could do right now because you got that deal. When you think about your fear of success, it’s not conscious a lot of the time. You have to tap into your subconscious to ask if you’re fearing your success and how and why that is. I think that is how you begin to overcome the fear of success. Honestly, I was in that category for a long time when I got started. I did more to self-sabotage my success than anything else. It’s not something that I’m proud of but understanding, overcoming, and growing from it is something that I’m massively proud of myself for. If you can do that too you should be proud too. So start to do that. If you find yourself constantly “having a failure” or a “problem comes up,” go back and think about the way you were thinking when the problem showed up. What did that look like for you? What you’re going to find is that a lot of the time, the problem showed up because you created it. Not intentionally or on purpose, but your subconscious allowed that problem to surface when it wouldn’t have happened if you were more aware of your fear of success. Think about that guys. Be aware of that.
A lot of ways to help you guys start overcoming that. Number 1: set your intention every single day. What do you intend to do today? Don’t let your subconscious control what you want to do and how you’re going to do it. Set your intention and drive home that intention all day long. You have to do that every day. It’s not going to be fun. But if you keep doing that then you mind will start to change and your brain will start to rewire itself for success. You’ll start seeing opportunities instead of problems. When that starts to happen, that’s when things change. It will take time, let’s make that very clear. I just posted yesterday when I was flying back to LA, I have a lot of opportunities in front of me right now in my business, life, and everything. I’d like to say it’s because of this or that, but it’s because I’ve put myself out there to see them and to say this is what I want from them. I say this is what I want from my business, from my life, from me. Then those things start showing up. It’s because I allowed myself the opportunity to see them. My intention was to be more open to the opportunity, to be looking for more of what I want to have and what’s next for me and where I want my business to go. The opportunities started to present themselves simply because of the intention. Not just because of the intention of our brains but because we see those opportunities where before you probably would have passed them over. They’ve always been there. You don’t become amazing just by saying “I’m amazing.” It’s because you took the opportunity to make yourself amazing, you chose to make yourself amazing. So that’s number 2.
Number 3 is the fear of criticism. Many of you talked about the fear of being criticized by clients, friends, and family who don’t understand the journey you’re on and you fear that negativity. What always struck me about this more than anything else is that when we talk about this, when we get criticism, constructive or not, I don’t get angry anymore. I look at it as a gift and I say thank you for this criticism. It’s not what I want to hear or that I can do things better, but when I get criticism I say thank you. This is because saying thank you to it allows you guys to be aware of it, let it impact you, and then to consciously choose to move forward with this criticism or if you’re ok with where it’s at right now. So I want you to change the way that you look at criticism. From now on, whenever anyone criticizes anything that you do, say thank you. Anything. Our first responses to criticism is usually to say come back say “you’re wrong because of this, this, this, and this.” I did this a lot back when I was at my old job. One of the feedbacks from several of my managers was that any time someone tried to help me grow, I would take said criticism and throw it back in their faces. When I looked back, that was 100 percent what I was doing. Back then I had that 20 year old cockiness attitude of “I know everything and I’m going to take over the world. When you truly start letting criticism become a gift to who you are, it will change the way you do things. It’ll change how you perceive criticism and how you react to it and it will help you see the opportunity inside of that criticism.
So I challenge you guys to go ahead and say “thank you” any time you get criticism. So that’s three. We’ve got fear of failure, of success, and of criticism. The last one is one is something that I think is rather interesting. It sort of combines a lot of things into one.
The last one is just unknown fear. I’m scared but I don’t know of what. This one is one of the hardest ones to deal with. If you understand what you’re afraid of then you can start to work on that. Fear of the unknown is a tough one. I’ve dealt with this myself and talked to a couple other people who also have.
Unknown fear is generally just fear overwhelming you for no other reason than you’re just feeling scared. There’s a lot of things causing it, but you can’t narrow down onto one thing. Being scared of your business or just what you could become is something very general. When you feel this unknown fear, it’s very nebulous and out there and all over the place. I challenge you to sit down and look at what you are doing when this fear crops up. Then dive into those activities and try to tie it back into something that you’re doing. Because fear doesn’t just come out of nowhere, right? It has to be triggered by something. The cause is external. So look at what you’re doing and journal those activities. When you have all of those written down, look for the common factor in those things to figure out what it is that is making you afraid. Start to tally up how many times you feel this fear when you’re doing things. You’ll find that you’ll be able to tackle those fears a bit easier when you start to do that.
