going through the weeds to get what you needs

Are you an aspiring online or bricks and mortar entrepreneur? Can you think of people that would benefit from what you have to offer, but don’t feel confident that anyone would be interested in it?

The thing standing between idea and action is often an emotion. Fear. This week, I’ll share an experience I had working with fear that made one of my dreams come true.

Awhile back, when “365”projects were the rage, I came across one that excited me. A “365” project is something you commit to doing every day for a year. It could be writing an essay, completing a maintenance task, or reaching out to someone you’d like to have a conversation with.

The idea for my 365 project was simple. I would do something I feared every day. It could be as simple as lying on the ground in a public place and looking up at the sky, finding someone to give my business card to, or having a conversation I’d been putting off.

One day, I got a brilliant idea at Robin’s Donuts. I would describe my “facing fear” project to a random table of customers, and then ask them to share something they feared with me. The nerve! 

I ordered my coffee and donut, and walked over to a table with 3 coffee drinkers sitting at it. I was terrified, but my blind optimism expected them to actually participate in this bizarre request. I would’ve. 

But as you can expect, the expression on the face of every one of them was the same. Who are you? Are you crazy? As it should have been. It was a big ask.

I got back in my car, and went to the marketing conference I was on my way to. What happened there wasn’t planned, but was the culmination of the fear project (cut short by about 335 days). It’s impossible to describe in words what happened there. 

It was a 3-day erosion of the ideology of the thing I valued most in life. The story that informed all my beliefs and behaviors for the first 38 years of my life no longer held true. I looked the biggest psychological fear, that I didn’t know I had, right in the eye.

The immediate result? I wondered if I could even believe that the sky was blue.

When I got home, I withdrew from everything. I quit the business groups I was a part of, took my vlog down from YouTube, and emailed the people I thought were responsible for removing the thing that mattered most to me from my brain. I kindly opted out of future communications with them. 

I wanted to stay where I was. Safe in the comfort of the place I’d tried to escape from for so long. I wrote letters to the thing that I lost, apologizing, and asking it to come back. I did everything I could to believe in it again.

I wish I had this post to read after I went through that. I looked everywhere for evidence that someone else had their head blown up, their reality shattered, and survived. At the time I didn’t know if I would ever recover.

But I also knew this was big, and as bad as it was, I didn’t want to lose any of it. I listed all the questions I had about what was now true and possible. I wrote down everything I could think of, knowing some day I would want to remember it.

I started vlogging, writing, and reconnecting with the world about 3 months later, even though my head was still swimming. I was a very different, humbled version of myself. I wondered if I could even believe that the sky was blue.

The final result? A manuscript for a feature film: Sole Proprietor

The persistent choices and actions you’re taking may seem like they don’t matter. They do! Keep trusting yourself and honoring your ideas. The universe will never disappoint you - it may rip your psyche to shreds, and if that’s what your psyche needs, you would never know that going into it! It would be packaged as something very different.