Fear: Does it stop you?

I've been thinking a lot about fear over the past few months. In many ways, fear has a healthy aspect to it -- it alerts us to dangers and helps protect us.

But when it comes to business and making big advances in our professional and personal lives, a couple specific fears stop us: the fear of doing it wrong & the fear of the unknown.

I've worked with many individuals who knew, deep down knew, that they needed to make changes in their lives or their careers, but they were scared of what came next -- the devil they knew was comforting in a way.

I've worked with business people who were so scared of making a mistake, they refused to move their business forward and found themselves floundering and couldn't understand why.

Fear freezes so many of us.

I've started to really notice the thread of it in questions I get from people: "aren't you scared of going onstage? Aren't you afraid?" when they hear I do comedy. They can't imagine doing it just because of imagined fear.

I've also seen the thread of fear in conversations from CEOs and major change-makers in different industries -- they aren't afraid to make mistakes. They don't think the next thing they launch has to be the only perfect answer, or that each try has to be 100% correct. Watch for those things when they speak or in how they act. The conversations of "iterate, iterate, iterate" -- keep doing it, keep trying, try new, new ideas, innovate -- these exist above a level of fear of the unknown or of mistakes.

I could say a lot more about this, and in fact I have a lot of thoughts about how to learn to move past fear personally and professionally and some key things that can teach you how to conquer fear, but for now, I challenge you to start to ponder: is fear stopping you from becoming the best version of yourself or the person you want to be?