Many times we are put into situations that make us feel uncomfortable and we are scared to face them. Without facing them we can never overcome them. Without overcoming them we can never grow from them. Without growth we are stagnant. Have you ever heard a successful business (or person) that was described as stagnant? I haven’t.
When facing these situations that put the fear of God into us, we cannot be paralyzed by that fear. Many people have faced the same or similar situations and have overcome them. How? By facing it head on and knowing that you want the desired outcome more than you are afraid of the situation.
I first learned this from football. I played safety and I was often times put up against running backs or tight ends who were much larger than me and were running full steam ahead and it was my job to tackle them. I knew they had the momentum, I knew that collision was going to hurt everything from my neck to my toes, and I knew that they wanted to run over me just as much as I wanted to stop them so they weren’t just going to go out of bounds when they saw me coming. But I in football you don’t have time to be paralyzed by fear, you are forced to make decisions FAST. I knew going into that situation that if I didn’t throw all of myself into that opposing player and sacrifice my body to make that tackle, they would run for a touchdown and I would let my team down. I wanted to make that tackle more than I was afraid of the pain of that collision. Football hurts, anyone who tells you otherwise A.) Never played past JV or B.) Was a kicker. And if I never accepted that it was going to hurt, put myself in that mindset, and faced the fear early, I never would have been able to make a play.
Business is just like this. Nobody likes to fire people, nobody likes to tell someone they’re not doing their job, nobody likes to cold call and push themselves on some unsuspecting bystander. But those all need to be done, and the faster you look that fear in the face and attack it, the faster your path to success will be. Your most difficult, taxing, dreadful tasks are the ones that will force you to grow the most. As soon as you transform that fear into optimism for your desired outcome, you will have what it takes to attack it. Do not focus on how awful reprimanding a colleague will be, focus instead on how much better your work will be once they pick up the slack. Do not focus on getting denied during a sales pitch, focus instead on that commission check when you close the deal. Do not focus on how long it’s going to take you to read that book, focus on how much you’ll learn from it.
Shift your focus from dread of the discomfort the to the joys of the outcome.
Face fears and grow!
