Fearlessness, uncertainty, and everything in between

There's a fine line between the awareness that a situation is presenting uncertainty and being fearful. Hey, it's Penny. I'm back. Hope you're having a great week. Fall is here. I don't know about you. I'm loving the weather. But, as always, as seasons change, life changes, business changes, and depending on where you are in your life, where you are in your business, what market you're in, there may or may not be a lot of uncertainty in what you're facing right now. So this is pretty much a blanket episode. I'm gonna speak in generalities towards business, but this comes anywhere in your life. It applies to your relationships as well. People often ask me how to be fearless in their life. They want this fearlessness in a variety of aspects in their life. Sometimes people want to know that they can truly speak their heart, speak their opinion, and be successful in business. I largely attribute this to cancel culture, but it's not only cancel culture. A lot of times people are afraid to show up and share who they are and what they really do because they're friends and their family, some of our most important relationships. Their friends and their family may judge them. They worry about how it will be received. Now in the last episode, I was talking about self trust and how parents may tell us that certain things won't bring us success. They won't bring us abundance, and some people will set out on that path and don't want their family to know, even if they are successful, exactly what it is that they're doing because they don't wanna deal with that judgment. They don't wanna have to deal with the comments.  [00:03:08] Sometimes when we become successful, especially if you have overcome a huge poverty mindset or if your family has always talked negatively about wealthy people, and rich people are awful. They're evil. All of these things. If you have worked to overcome stories from your family that rich people are evil, that it's wrong to be wealthy, that it's greedy. All of these things if , you've worked to overcome these stories. Some people don't even let their families know that they have wealth, and understandably so, because they don't wanna deal with that backlash. I've even worked with someone. Whose family once they found out how successful they were, even though over the course of several years, they had not changed one bit, they were the same person. The only thing was they did not share with their family their wealth, and then when the pandemic hit came the golden opportunity to exit their business, cash out in a very big way. And I mean, who wouldn't do that? So they were able to take a breather, take a little sabbatical if you will, bought a new home. Nothing extravagant, but the family was like, It's a middle of the pandemic. How did you buy a new home? And they're doing a little remodel and they're like, Well, you're not working. Where are you getting money? And it was like a switch was flipped. And So people wanna know, how can I be fearless? How can I be fearless about having more wealth? It doesn't matter if you're going from six figures to multi six, from high, multi six to seven, multi seven, multi eight. There always comes for most of us, this place where we feel like we've crossed a threshold that the way others view us is gonna be changing. So we hold back a little. And people wanna just be them. they don't want to have to put up a mask or pretend to be something they're not when they're with friends and family.  [00:05:32] The other thing around fearlessness I already mentioned about speaking truth, how cancel culture can come into play, friends, families, opinions. Some people have just never made the really big decisions. They're coming into this place where they truly have to develop that millionaire mindset where you have to trust because you gotta make that investment in order to see things grow to the next level. And there comes a big shift in thinking about how you invest money. When you invest money. What that looks like. And people wanna be fearless around that. They don't want to be afraid to invest that money. And then that ties back in to the self trust, and the self trust simply at that point not that they have evidence that they can't do it, it's that they don't have evidence that they can, because this, decision is so different from any other decision that they've ever made before. And I'm sure you've been there where you come to this new place and you're having to make decisions that you never made before. It feels uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. There's a difference in knowing and having the awareness and the recognition that you can't control how it's gonna turn out, and being in fear and getting stuck. And this is one of the things that I will coach clients on. Like we can't eliminate your body's stress response. [00:07:23] So fear is on a continuum, at one end of the bell curve you’ve got completely safe, secure. Nothing in this world could rock me. I am solid. Then at the other end of the continuum, you have fear that is so severe that you're just like completely paralyzed, and then there's a thousand variations of fear, Degrees of fear in between. It's a whole bunch of grey. When we are doing things that are new, things that are uncertain, we are going to fire off our stress response. Most people know it as fight, flight, freeze, or fun. But anytime there's any uncertainty, we're gonna fire off that stress response and we may feel a little, uh, some little something in the pit of the stomach or “Wow, you know, I'm really not sure about this. I'm not feeling grounded in that situation”. You're like, Well, you know what? I've never done this before. I have made other big decisions that work out just fine. I know that I can trust my judgment, so let's move forward. And there's gonna be that little bit of uncertainty. There's gonna be that little bit of edge. That's normal. You can't just turn off your stress response and never have it come back. But if you're having so much fear that you can't make the decision, or you're delaying on this decision to the point that you miss the window and it's costing you money, it's costing you revenue, it's costing you clients, customers, contracts, whatever it may be, then it's a problem. And it's up to you to have that awareness, to the degree that this is interrupting, interfering, and slowing down what it is that you want in life. [00:09:16] Because how you handle these situations is about more than the impact you're having. It's about more than the legacy that you're building. It's also about how others see you responding in these situations. Because other people are picking up on your energy. They're seeing how you handle the more challenging decisions they're seeing, how you handle the high stakes moments, whatever that is for you. And they're learning from you, So fearlessness. Fearless is knowing that it's safe to be you. Fearless is about not being attached to what other people think about you. Now, that doesn't mean you can go out and be a jerk and say, Well, I don't care what you think about me. I'll be a jerk all day long. No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about recognizing that what someone else thinks of you is 100% about them and where they are in life, and it is 0% about you. I mean, unless you're the type of person that goes out, maliciously does something to people. But if you're listening to my podcast, there's a pretty darn good chance that is not you. I tend to not attract people who are malicious and malign people and that kind of thing.  [00:10:44] So it’s also about recognizing that most people are so preoccupied with their own stuff in life. They're not noticing us. they really aren't. People are so caught up in their own stuff that unless they're being petty and gossipy and they're jealous, they're not paying attention. And that has nothing to do with you, your message, your value, your worth, what you are bringing to the world and putting out there. Because we came into this life to be on a journey to connect with our authenticity. And our authenticity is not that we show up on social media or we go on YouTube or, for people who, get up on stage or you're on media. It's not about going out there and being vulnerable and sharing all of the awful things or the good things or the embarrassing things that have happened in your life. You're authenticity is who you are. It's what sets you apart on the inside from everyone else. The way that you process, the way that you share your message, what brings you joy, your dreams, your desires, the way that you're here to serve the world. That's what authenticity is, and. The reason people come to me about wanting to fearlessly be themselves and sometimes not even knowing who that is, it's because they know that there's something that's not aligned with that authenticity. They just don't express it that way. So being fearless, know that if you're feeling uncertainty, uncertainty doesn't have to be fear. And the thing that can separate uncertainty in doing something new and different outside of your comfort zone and being fearful is your thoughts around it. In terms of being fearless and being yourself. It's about your willingness to separate yourself and who you are from other people's opinions, because one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. I'll see you next week.