Transform Fear Into Fuel. Embrace Imperfection. Exceed Your Capacity. Ep. 016

Transform the way you view fear and propel your business to new heights! In this episode of Brightside Business we discuss the the secrets to overcoming entrepreneurial fears. Joey breaks down the societal pressures, perfectionism, and learned fears that often cripple business owners and offers actionable strategies to reframe these fears, turning them from paralyzing obstacles into empowering alerts.

Join Joey as he dives into eye-opening statistics about the prevalence of fear of failure and tackles the roots of this pervasive issue. Drawing from personal experience and extensive conversations with fellow entrepreneurs, Joey provides a refreshing perspective on how to embrace imperfection and focus on what truly drives business growth. This isn't just another generic talk on motivation; it's a transformative session packed with practical insights that will help you face entrepreneurship's toughest challenges with newfound confidence. Don't miss out on this opportunity to shift your mindset and unlock your business's full potential!

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Transcript

Joey Young: 0:00

Welcome to Breadside Business, where we talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about how to grow to seven figures and beyond. My name is Joey Young. I helped grow my family's professional services business to seven figures in under two years and I learned a lot of lessons along the way. One of them is how to deal with fear, the emotion of fear and failure during the entrepreneurship journey. There's so many things we can unpack here, but I'm just going to help you create a new definition of fear today so, when you're facing situations that are outside your comfort zone and outside your capacity, you don't let those situations dictate your business's growth, but instead have the tools to push through them and ultimately win.

Joey Young: 0:39

So what are we talking about here? We're talking about one of the most powerful fears that America deals with in the modern day the fear of failure. They did a study Lincoln Goal and YouGov of a thousand Americans and asked them what are they afraid of? 15% said paranormal activity was a fear of theirs. So seeing a ghost at the foot of their bed 31% fear of failure was something that they actively had fears about. Fear of failure affects more than double the amount of people who fear a ghost showing up in their bedroom. So I think this is something that's on a lot of people's minds and that we should tackle here. So let's talk about where fear comes from.

Joey Young: 1:15

Well, as an entrepreneur, there's many ways and opportunities to have fear. Obviously, a lot is on the line with starting a business and running a business, but societal pressure, judgment from others, can be one of them. People are afraid to start a business because they don't want to be seen as a failure if it doesn't work. They don't want to be seen struggling. We don't want to be shown in a lack of confidence and a lack of success sort of light. This can be a huge issue. We're pressured to not only have a successful business and to do well from the beginning, but we feel this pressure to make it look easy as well and to not look like we're struggling.

Joey Young: 1:54

You know, another source of fear can be perfectionism. We think things should look a certain way and really perfectionism is rooted in unrealistic expectations that we have of ourselves. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and I've been through this journey myself of feeling, like you know, I need to have XYZ branding and marketing before I can launch this business, or I need to have XYZ staff on my team because I don't feel confident in this area before I can push out and really push this new initiative. Sometimes it looks like feeling like you have an expectation on a certain product or service you're launching or scaling that it should have some sort of level of polish before it's launched or beta tested. These little expectations that are seemingly innocuous can actually be really damaging to a business, because if the expectations that we don't talk about, that we bring to our business, that can be the most damaging to our growth. And so we need to stop thinking what should things look like and start embracing what actually works to grow our business. And part of this is just facing the fear of perfectionism, facing the fear that things are not going to be perfect, facing the fear of letting go of some of the presuppositions we have about our business to be able to work on what actually works to grow it.

Joey Young: 3:19

You know, a third source of fear for us as business owners is learned fears. So this is something that's not really talked about. But let's say, your parents or a family member or even a boss you had at one point was an entrepreneur and they struggled. It was really, really hard for them, and so you watch that and you kind of internalize that when you were younger. The fact that it just comes with the territory. When you own a business, you're going to suffer, you're going to work long hours, you're not going to make much money, you're going to have staff problems. There's all these fears that we have as entrepreneurs because we've watched someone else experience them, even though we didn't experience them themselves, but even though they're not an active problem for us, because we've seen it we feel afraid of these scenarios that we've never experienced, because they're learned fears. So my proposal to you today is not to avoid fear, but actually to change your definition of it. This will help you to deal with all these types of fears.

Joey Young: 4:17

As an entrepreneur, the first and foremost mindset we have to shift is from fear being an alarm to it being an alert. In our lives, a lot of people view fear as an alarm. If I feel fear, I have to run. I have to avoid it, I have to shove it under the carpet. I have to see it as the enemy. Fear is a bad thing. My proposal to you is that fear is actually more of an alert, because here's the reality this isn't 3000 BC and we're not standing in front of grizzly bears every other day. We actually don't have a whole lot of use for fear in the same ways that we needed it back when we were facing predators on the daily in the forest right.

Joey Young: 4:57

So instead of responding to it like there is actual danger, we need to separate ourselves from it and view it as an alert that we're not necessarily in danger. Maybe we're just stepping outside our comfort zone and that's a good thing. Maybe we're not. Actually, there's not something actually going wrong. It's not an alarm. Maybe the fear that we're feeling in a particular moment is simply a signal that we're stepping outside our comfort zone, that we're doing. Maybe the fear that we're feeling in a particular moment is simply a signal that we're stepping outside our comfort zone, that we're doing something new, that we're increasing our capacity, that we're doing something outside of the realm of normalcy and there's a little bit of unknown with that. So, yes, there's going to be fear. So if we can shift our perspective, it actually helps us to face these fears head on, instead of again thinking of them as the enemy, something to be avoided, something to be pushed off and not really dealt with. So what's really cool is if we know what the triggers of fear are, we can understand what it is to feel fear and then reverse engineer it back to the point where we can say, okay, I know what triggers the fear, so I know I'm in fear, so I can remember to change my perspective on it.

Joey Young: 6:07

You've probably heard a lot of what the feelings of fear are before. You know the fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses to fear. But if we can reverse engineer these and understand when we have those feelings, to recognize that we are not in a moment of danger but that we're in a moment of growth, this will help us to overcome a lot of those fears of failures that we have learned, that we have experienced as business owners. So what does fight look like? Well, fight can often look like pushing back in anger in a moment of fear. A lot of people actually deal with their fear as anger. So if you're the kind of person who has the proclivity to have an emotional outburst, to be a little bit aggressive when you're feeling afraid, watch out for that and remember okay, I'm getting angry here because I have some fear, there's something to deal with behind this. You know flight is. You know that moment where you're trying to avoid something because it makes you scared. Flight is a response like you open up your inbox, you see an email with a specific headline that strikes fear in your chest and you close your inbox. That's the avoidance piece, that's the flight piece of fear in the modern day.

Joey Young: 7:20

Freezing is when you don't know what to say, your mind is blank, your heart is beating and that's pretty much the only thing that's going on. You might have this moment when you know you receive some bad news or they have a little bit of anxiety about an event coming up where you have to perform or a big project you have to launch. You might freeze up, your brain might shut down and this dramatically decreases the quality of your decision making when you're in this state. So it's important to recognize when you're in the freeze state, when you feel like you can't speak you don't really have a lot of brain processing power at the moment to recognize that and then again to work your way back and say, okay, I'm experiencing fear right now, but this doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong. It's not an alarm, it's just an alert that I'm experiencing fear. Maybe this is a good thing, because that upcoming project I'm really nervous about launching is actually pushing my business forward in a way that we would have never accomplished if I just stayed within the realm of the known and what we've done before and what was easy.

Joey Young: 8:21

And then FON is an interesting response to fear. It's placating the source of fear to try to reduce harm to ourselves. So if you have an employee who you get in tussles with a lot and all of a sudden you start to see their engines revving and they're getting pissed and they're about to lash out at you, the fawn response to fear is saying oh, listen, listen, listen, I understand, it totally, totally would. Listen, listen, I understand that it totally, totally would. Okay, just tell me what you want. Whatever you say, I'll do it. You're right, I'm sorry, just tell me what you want in this situation and you can have it Like that's a fawn response. You try to reduce the damage that you're about to experience by placating someone who's angry at you to experience by placating someone who's angry at you.

Joey Young: 9:06

So all these four triggers of fear, these responses to fear, rather they're ways that we can recognize we're in the moment in a state of fear, and then there are triggers for us to go and say, okay, I am experiencing this right now, but I'm not necessarily in danger. I'm not necessarily in a place where I need to switch up what I'm doing or avoid what I'm about to do next. There are more ways for us to recognize that we're experiencing fear in the 21st century, which is, most of the time, just us stepping outside our comfort zone, and that's a good thing. So, as an entrepreneur, if you deal with fears like expectations from others, if you deal with perfectionism, if you deal with some learned fears, remember in those moments when their fear responses pop up that you don't have to stop, you don't have to freeze, you don't have to flash out and fight, you don't have to fawn. You can just breathe and step into a moment of clarity, peace, and remember that you're probably on the right track, you're not doing anything wrong.

Joey Young: 10:07

Hey, I hope this has been helpful for you. If this show has helped you at all, I would love to hear your specific questions about business and productivity. So shoot me an email with your questions and I will actually be able to address them on the show. I'd love to hear what questions you have about business or productivity. So that's joey at joeyhyoungcom or my Instagram. Shoot me the question in a DM that's at joeyhyoung on Instagram and, while you're here, you made it to the end of the video. So you probably enjoyed this at least a little bit. Give it a thumbs up, leave the five-star review, hit the share button on this. Wherever you're hearing or listening to this, you know, or watching this on YouTube, and I would really appreciate it because it really does help push the video out in the algorithms when you use those thumbs up and those share buttons and stuff. So thank you again for supporting the show in that way and until next time, my friends, happy scaling.