What You Fear Owns You – And Your Results

Let’s talk about fear.

Not the big, obvious kind.
The quiet kind.

The kind that sounds like
“I’ll do it later”
“I just need to think about it a bit more”
“Now’s probably not the right time”

And it feels reasonable.

In this episode, we unpack how fear doesn’t stop you in obvious ways. It shows up in small, everyday decisions and over time, those decisions shape your results more than anything else.

This is a grounded look at avoidance, growth, and how to start taking back control without trying to become someone else overnight.

In this episode we cover:
• Why fear rarely shows up in obvious ways
• How avoidance disguises itself as logic and timing
• The subtle decisions that are actually driven by fear
• Why staying where you are can feel like a choice but isn’t
• How avoidance behaviour makes things feel bigger over time
• The difference between something being unsafe and just uncomfortable
• Why growth and fear often sit side by side
• How fear starts shaping your identity and decision making
• The reason confidence never comes before action
• How to start moving without overwhelming yourself

Key insights:
• What you avoid doesn’t disappear, it grows
• Fear often sounds logical, not emotional
• Small decisions driven by fear compound over time
• You don’t need to go big, you just need to move
• Confidence is built after action, not before it

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts
https://www.sharonfrancisco.com/podcast

Connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook
Questions for the podcast? hello@sharonfrancisco.com

---
👉  Also: The Entrepreneurial Bookkeeper — grow your business without sacrificing your health: sharonfrancisco.com/program

Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook.

Have a question for the podcast? Email hello@sharonfrancisco.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Sharon Francisco show. What you fear owns you and your results. Today I'm going to be talking about fear. I remember talking to my coach years ago, and I asked him, Why do I struggle so much to push through these invisible boundaries or the things that I seem to I kind of know, but I just don't seem to be able to do them. And I'll never forget what he said. He said, Most of us know what we need to do. We just need reminding. And I thought about that for a while. And I thought, I can be reminded every single day about what I need to do. I'm still not going to do it. So there's got to be deeper than that. I've got to figure out what it is that's actually stopping me here. So again, what you fear owns you. And I don't mean some in some kind of big dramatic kind of way. I mean in the small everyday decisions we're making without even realizing it. Because fear doesn't walk in and announce itself and says, hey, it's me. Hi, I'm fear. I'm here to ruin your life today. It's a lot, lot more subtle than that. It sounds more like, you know, I'll do that later. Or I just need to think about this one a little bit more. Now's probably not the right time. And it feels almost reasonable. That's the problem. And I'll give you a few more examples of over the years. I've been coaching on and off now for nearly 20 years in different ways. I've talked with people that haven't taken holidays for over 20 years. And when I've said to them, you know, if you worked for somebody else and they said, hey, yeah, look, I'm going to pay you 100 grand a year or 80 grand a year or whatever. And I want you to come to work and I want you to work about 10, 15 hours a day. And I want you to work some weekends, but it gets a bit busy. I want you to eat weekends and nights. And you know, when you go away on a holiday, I want you to take your laptop and I want you to work when you're away as well. Would you ever put up your hand and say, yay, that sounds like a great job? But we do it for ourselves. We work weekends and we take long, long times of years sometimes without taking a holiday. And as I said, there's a person that I spoke to years ago that didn't take a holiday for over 20 years. Somebody else I spoke with years ago as well, and he was wanting to start a business. And so what he did was he got some money given to him, and he thought, you know what, I'm going to really work hard on getting myself ready to start my business. When I spoke to him, he'd been getting himself ready for eight months. I said, so what have you done so far? And he go, I've done all the research and I'm starting to get systemized and I'm, you know, getting getting myself ready. I said, yeah, okay. So how many cards have you got? He said, none. I'm like, okay, well, we and I in my head, I'm going, all right, money's coming from somewhere. Where's the money coming? And I said, so you're, you've got obviously a lot of cash in the background to support you doing this. He said, no, no, I'd I'd need money now. And I remember thinking, wow, he's he's been doing this for so long, getting ready, but not taking action. And when I started to talk to him about the things that he had to do to get out there and start building his business, I could feel the sort of backpedaling a little bit, like, oh, okay, I know. There was a subconscious thing going on where he knew what he had to do. He just wasn't doing it because obviously there wasn't any money in the bank from him taking that time off. And I think you could, there's heaps of examples around this sort of stuff with not taking holidays, not doing the things that we know we should be doing, like, you know, systemizing, like hiring team members so we can start delegating some of the day-to-day work that we don't want to do, setting our business up so that businesses up so they actually, so our business actually serves us in a way that, you know, sets us free where we're not a slave to our business. These are the sort of things that I'll do later. I just need to think about a little bit more. Now's probably not the right time. That's that's the reality of not taking holidays for a long time. That's a reality of not increasing your prices and not having the money that you know you should be earning for the amount of work that you're putting in. It's all subtle. It all sounds reasonable when we say, yeah, I'm working on that, but we know that it's not enough or it's not going to get us the outcomes. That's why it's a problem. But if you really look at it, a lot of these decisions aren't coming from clarity. They're coming from avoidance. Like, again, you don't post a video, not because you don't know what to say. You do know what to say. The reason you don't post the video is that you just don't want to feel judged. You don't increase the prices, not because you don't have, not because you haven't sort of done the numbers and figured it out or know how to increase your prices, but because you don't want that moment where a client says, Well, don't think I'm going to continue with you. That sounds a bit much, or isn't that a bit much? So that feeling of somebody might be saying that will stop you from doing a full increase in prices. You don't hire somebody because you don't want to get it wrong. Because you know what? Your clients are really, really important to you. And what if you hire somebody that doesn't do it the same way you do it? So you avoid it and you don't do it. You stay stuck and you stay where you are. And that looks from the outside like a choice, but it's not really. It's just fear making the decision ever so quietly in the background. And I've seen this in my in myself, even just recently. There'll be something that I know I should be doing, and all of a sudden I get very logical about it. I'll just wait. I'll just wait and think this through. And if I'm really honest, it's not strategy, it's not avoidance, it's just me not doing it. And I put some logical reason around it. Like when we decided to move interstate, probably nearly close to two decades ago, it was the biggest decision to leave the comfort of our tiny close-knit community where everyone knew everyone and it felt so safe and so secure. And we were going to make the decision to move to the city. And we'd spent time to get to that decision, we'd spent time with a business coach, and he just kept asking me over and over and over what I wanted from the business. And I finally, he kept, he just wouldn't leave me alone. He kept coming up to me, asking me over and over. And finally, I said, you know what? I don't want my get the town where I grew up was a mining town. And most of the people that lived there would at one point work in the mines. I was one of the first women to work underground in the mines where I grew up. And I said to him, I didn't want my children to work in the mines. My brother had had a very bad accident in the mines, and he was in intensive care for a long, long time. And I knew that the money was good, but the the risks were not worth it because, you know, the risks of how dangerous it is working in the mines. So I said, look, I don't want my kids to to work in the mines. And if we stay here, it's quite likely that one of them or both of them will work in the mines at one point. And I didn't want my children to work on the land. So where how I grew up on the land, because it's hard. It's hard to, it's hard work to do all that. So I said, I don't want to, I don't want my kids to live here anymore. And it was so tricky, the decision, because I was so torn. I was very comfortable in that environment. And it felt safe and secure. And it felt like, you know, why would I want to move from that? I remember the day we left like yesterday. It was so sad. I was so emotional. And it it was the hardest, one of the hardest things I've ever done. I still clearly remember um the one of the guys that worked for us, Scotty Robinson. He um he went out on the road that left town and he put uh toilet paper strung across the road. He had one other person with him, and he had it like we were breaking through the finish line and we're leaving town. And it was one of the most beautiful things anyone could ever do for us. And it was kind of like a final goodbye. And I was like, oh man, this is so emotional. I was so scared to leave, all the safety, all the familiarity, and the people and how nice they they are. They still are, they're still beautiful people, but I knew I had to go. And and we we made that decision to leave. As uneasy and hard as it was, we made the decision to leave. And there's actually research around this avoidance behavior, and it's basically says that the more we avoid something, the bigger it feels, not smaller. So the thing we're avoiding feels harder tomorrow and then harder again. And this is where it starts to own you because now it's not just one thing, it starts shaping how you operate. You start playing a bit smaller and you start staying in what's comfortable. You start making decisions based on what feels safe instead of what actually moves you forward personally and professionally. And here's the bit I think that feels a little bit confronting. You can say you want growth, you can say you want more clients, more money, more freedom, holidays to create a really successful business that creates financial independence for yourself. But if your decisions are being filtered through fear, you won't move, not properly. Now, I'm not saying go and throw yourself into things that feel completely unsafe. That's not it. But there's a difference between something being dangerous or feeling like it's too risky, and something that's just a little bit uncomfortable. And most of the time, it's just a little bit uncomfortable, not dangerous and not too risky. So, what do you actually do with this information? Because just knowing it doesn't change anything. So the first thing, and this is the simple but powerful thing, is calling it out. Stop dressing it up, just say it, say it out loud. This is fear controlling me. It's not timing, it's not strategy, it's not I'll do it later. It's just fear. Because the moment you see that properly and you say it out loud, you don't have to say it out loud to anyone else. You can say it out loud to yourself. As soon as you do that, it loses a little bit of its grip. And the second thing is don't go too big. This is where I think a lot of people get it a little bit messed up. They think they need to go all in, and you just don't have to go all in. You just need to move a little bit, a tiny little bit. If a video feels hard for you to do your own video, just do the one minute, like I've spoken about in previous podcasts. If a price increase feels a bit too big, start with just one client. If hiring feels like, gosh, I don't know, could I hire somebody to help me out? If that feels too much to hire somebody in a full-time role, start with somebody for a few hours to begin with. You're not trying to feel amazing. You're just letting fear make the call. And the third thing, and this is the one thing that the one thing that people really don't like hearing, is confidence doesn't come first. We're waiting for that magical confidence to come down and with a magical wand and hit you on the top of the head and say, now you're confident. It doesn't work like that. Confidence doesn't come first, it just doesn't. You don't wake up one day and go, oh, great, now I'm ready. It comes after you've done the thing a few times, over and over. Then you go, oh, that wasn't so bad as I thought. And how many times have you said that when you've tried something? Oh, that wasn't as bad as I thought. And that's how it builds. And I'm gonna be honest with you, there's still things that I hesitate with all the time, but now I catch it quicker. And I see when I'm starting to avoid something, and I just think, nope, that's not gonna own me. We're not going there. Because I know where that leads, and that doesn't go anywhere, it just doesn't go away and it just sits there and it slowly starts running more and more of your decisions. So I'm gonna leave you with this. What you're avoiding right now, not the big dramatic thing, but the small one, the one that keeps popping up for you and it keeps pushing out, because that thing, that's the one thing that's probably got a bit of control on you. And the moment you turn towards it, even just slightly, you take the control back. And that's where everything's going to shift. I have a quote up on my wall, and I love it. It says, if something feels too hard to start, it just means that the first step isn't small enough. So if you're thinking about doing something at the moment in your business or in your personal life, and it feels too big, chunk it down into one step, one of the first steps. If you feel like, yeah, I could do that. So chunk it down into something that feels like you could take that step and then take the next step, and then take, and then it's cumulative. You'll be able to start taking more and more bigger steps the more comfortable you get. Hopefully, this has been helpful. And until next time, talk to you soon. Bye.