I get scared sometimes ok? And then I feel relief knowing my fear didn’t kill me after all. In fact, it assisted me.
When I share with people that I give talks, I also share that I’m nervous about public speaking. Totally TMI right? However, even Adele tells people she’s scared when she sings to crowds, sometimes she tells the crowds just before she begins another song. “I love you but you really really scare me”, is what I remember she said.
But I’m not Adele. Publicly saying I’m nervous, especially while delivering my 30-second elevator speech, isn’t a winning strategy for attracting people to hire me. You’d never know, at one time, I used to work in advertising. Note to self: must self-promote better.
I have other fears too. There’s having blood drawn but the older I get the more practice I have at it. There’s my new fear of Copperhead snakes. Yikes, they are a badass snake. They don’t slither away from us, they hunker down, appearing to be a confident and secure snake. Because we adjoin woods we occasionally bump into them on our property. And so I wear my gardening boots to prevent a nasty problem. And we don’t reach down and weed under a bush without raking first. I’m just about over that fear. I love to garden and that fear is not going to get in the way of it.
But…being seen by ooodles of people? Not so eazy peazy. Sometimes I’m not as badass as I’d like to be. Everyone knows that many people are nervous about public speaking. 
That very unhelpful factoid doesn’t mean that particular fear isn’t something for me to look at. For me, it’s about how I feel about myself. That I am not enough and I’m afraid you’ll see that too. Way more challenging than dealing with Copperheads.
But over the years, I worked on I’m not enough.
I learned to be more aware of what I was thinking about myself and the words I chose. Over the years, I released many negative beliefs about myself, replacing them with way healthier ones. But never skip the valuable, but sometimes highly uncomfortable step, of looking inside of me to understand where all that came from, how it started, and why I kept believing it. The more I understood, the more I let go of one limiting belief at a time. If I do say so, the result is totally worth it.
Is it TMI to share my fears?
Nope. I’m human and I get to share my humanity, particularly given what I talk about. I get to show people what it looks like to have a debilitating fear and face it. The fear was not so much about the microphone or stage as much as it was about me. Also, we’re all vulnerable in different ways and it’s our human qualities that connect us.
If this fear is showing up again at this time, it’s because I’m stepping up to bigger opportunities and allowing more of me to be seen. However, the art of looking and releasing is way easier and faster now, because I know to always look inside of me and to learn from that place. Throughout the remainder of my life, I plan on acting on many of my dreams. And if the belief I’m not good enough shows up again? Oh, it will. A deeper layer of I’m not enough will keep popping up until I’ve learned what it is I’m to learn. I’ll keep looking until those beliefs completely disappear.