What’s holding you back from going after want you want? Could it be fear? In most cases, fear is the root of all problems when it comes to dreaming big, showing up, and moving forward as an entrepreneur! In today’s episode, I’m highlighting the importance of mindset and how you can overcome fear by facing it.
The Shoot It Straight Podcast is brought to you by Sabrina Gebhardt, photographer and educator. Join us each week as we discuss what it’s like to be a female creative entrepreneur while balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood. If you’re trying to find balance in this exciting place you’re in, yet willing to talk about the hard stuff too, Shoot It Straight Podcast is here to share practical and tangible takeaways to help you shoot it straight.
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This episode is brought to you by Root to Rise, a mastermind and retreat for female photographers where personal development meets business growth. During the four-month experience, students have weekly calls focused on goals, boundaries, money, and marketing. The program also includes incredible guest teachers, a private Facebook community, and weekly Voxer hours with individualized guidance and mentorship. Sign up today to join the waitlist.
Review the Show Notes:
Understanding Your Fears (1:29)
Examples of Fear (2:15)
Fear Causes Problems (6:05)
Continuing to Do the Work (7:20)
1. What is Fear & Why Do We Experience It? (11:28)
2. What’s the Worst Case Scenario? (15:09)
3. I’m Still Scared, Now What? (19:45)
Episode Links:
Review the Transcript:
Welcome back to the shoot straight podcast, my friend today, when I’m recording this, my kids are off of school. So you know, it’s a little bit of a free for all around here, and I have a podcast episode do. And there’s something that’s been coming up recently, it’s been coming up on my coaching calls, it’s been coming up in Voxer with my mastermind students. I’ve seen it here and there on social media. And I just thought this is the perfect thing we’re going to we are going to tackle this today, it’s going to be on the podcast. It’s something that I’ve talked about here in there in conference talks, and I’ve mentioned it in podcast episodes before and I definitely coach on it. But we’re going to dedicate the whole dang thing to this today. It’s a pretty big subject. And that is fear.
Welcome to the shoot it straight podcast. I’m your host, Sabrina Gephardt. Here I will share an honest take on what it’s like to be a female creative entrepreneur, while balancing business motherhood and life. myself along with my guests will get vulnerable through honest conversations and relatable stories because we’re willing to go there. If you’re trying to find balance in this exciting place you’re in yet willing to talk about the hard stuff to to shoot it straight podcast is here to share practical and tangible takeaways to help you shoot it straight. Whether or not you realize it, it’s probably getting in your way in some shape, or form. It’s getting in your way it’s holding you back. And maybe you don’t even know that you’re struggling with it, right. So fear can look like a lot of different things. And I’m just going to give you a few examples. And let’s see what resonates right? Maybe you are you’re having the inability to be consistent with showing up online. Something as simple as you just can’t get it going. You know, you want to show up online, you have the best intentions to do it. But you’re always talking yourself out of it. Or you’ll do it for a day and then you’ll stop, you’re not consistent. You can’t continue to show up, you refuse to continue to show up. Maybe you have a fear of showing your face. Maybe you have a fear of what people will think of you or how they will react. Maybe you have a fear that all of your efforts aren’t going to work. That what’s the point? Why am I doing this, it’s a waste of time, it’s not going to work anyways. Okay, or maybe fear is showing up with your clients. Maybe you have some things as simple as like an inability to take control with your clients. Maybe you’re at sessions and you have a hard time directing and posing or telling them know if they make some crazy, outlandish suggestion that you know is not going to work. Or maybe they asked for your opinion on clothing and you are fearful of telling them that you really prefer one option over the other. That inability to take control of your clients can be a fear of making someone mad, a fear of quote unquote messing up or doing something that’s not the best or the best choice or not being perfect not doing it well.
Or maybe you have a fear of being seen as fake, right like see being seen as an imposter being seen as not really the professional that you think you are. Another way that fear can show up is with this inability to try and write content, emails, newsletters, sales, copy, website copy that really connects, okay, maybe you just want to sell but you don’t want to build a relationship. You don’t want to be vulnerable. You don’t want to show up in a way that connects with clients. That could be a fear that no one cares what you have to say. No one cares what I have to say. So why am I going to share I’m not going to it could be a fear of pushing people away. A fear of if I share that story, that thing I like this thing that happened to me my view of this, then I’m going to repel certain people and they’re not going to want to connect with me so I’m not going to share about that thing. It could also be a fear of selling. Maybe you are having a hard time showing up and connecting with an audience because you just don’t want to be seen as pushy or salesy or seen as someone who is selling a product or service. Okay.
Other ways that fear can be showing up for you. Maybe you’re really struggling with this inability to ask for or receive support. Okay, maybe you’re thinking no And else can do it as well as I can write this fear that if you hand off a task or certain tasks or a part of your business or a part of your life, that no one else is going to do it as well as you. So what, why would I hand it off, I’m not going to, I’m just going to keep doing those things myself. Or there’s a fear that your business can’t afford to pay for something right now. They can’t, you can’t afford to hire help to get support to outsource that thing. You’re fearful about the finances, maybe it’s fear of losing control, fear that if you hand off enough parts of your business, you’re not going to feel in control of it anymore, in control of where it goes, how it grows, what the destiny is. And so you want to hoard all of that control and keep your hands on everything yourself. So when I go through that list of examples, and let me be clear, there are a million other ways that fear could be showing up for you, absolutely a million, okay? They can be showing up in your personal life, in your business, in big ways, and in little ways. And they are causing this, this fear these ways that it’s showing up, it’s causing a massive pile of problems. So my friend, if any of these resonated with you, then I just want to be very clear, you are having a little bit of a struggle with a mindset issue around fear. Okay. And I don’t say that because I want you to feel bad. I say that, in hopes that you’ll hear out of this whole, these all these different ways that fear can show up. I hope you’re putting together the pieces and realizing that everyone struggles with fear in one way or another.
Therefore, everyone struggles with this mindset issue in one way or another. No matter how brave you are, no matter if you’d like to take risks or not. No matter how much coaching you’ve received, no matter how long you’ve been in business, this stuff comes up. Yes, you’ll work through it, and you’ll get to the other side, and then it’s going to show up in a different way. And then you’re going to have to work through it again. Fear will always get in the way, it will always try and get in the way. So when I say that there’s a mindset issue that you need to work through. Yes, that’s true. But this is not a one and done. Mindset issues, quite frankly, are never a one and done. This is not something that you can just do the work and better your mindset around certain things. And then you don’t ever have to deal with it again. Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. This is a life long process. This is an awareness around the issue. And then being willing to work through the issue, overcoming the issue. And then having that awareness again, when it starts to happen with something else in the future. Okay.
So now that we’ve gotten this out of the way, right, on this podcast, I talk about mindset a lot because it matters. I think mindset affects everything we do, the way we parent, the way we run our business, the way we talk to ourselves, our physical health, our mental health, our relationships, our goals, the vision for our lives. Mindset plays a role in literally everything. It affects our lives in so many ways. And it has an absolutely massive impact on our business. And fear is just one of these issues that I see over and over again. And again. I see this because I’m a coach, but I also see this in myself. Okay, we all have this, it is underneath so many struggles. So today, I just I want to give you three different things to consider about fear, and how it might be affecting your life
and your business. And I’m just, I’m riffing on these things today. Okay, I have the three things written down, and we’re just going to see where it goes. But these are things that I know to be true things that I have seen work in my students and in myself. And so if you’re struggling with a fear of something today, I want you to work through these things. And if you don’t think you’re struggling with any fear today, put these in your back pocket for when something comes up, because it will. Today’s episode is brought to you by the roundtable a community built for female photographers who want to continue growing their business while forging industry friendships along the way. In this group, you will learn practical ways to move your business forward, while finding community and accountability with like minded photographers. The roundtable consists of three main parts, new live trainings that drop every month, a growing vault of all of the past trainings and of course the community. Are you curious how it works every month that you will get access to three new pieces have content over a broad variety of topics like pricing, editing, goal setting, website reviews, social media and videos of me behind the scenes at real sessions. Members also have the opportunity to learn from incredible guest speakers and industry leaders on a huge variety of topics. I pride myself in giving you just enough education every month to keep you growing and moving forward. While not overwhelming you with content.
The membership vault is such a valuable resource that is honestly more than worth the cost of enrollment on its own. As of today, it has close to 100 trainings and only continues to grow. It literally holds every training from the very beginning of the membership and not to name drop. But the guest experts that come teach inside this group are industry leaders, like Amanda Warfield of chasing simple, Natty Shang Kohli, James J. Boyd, and Don Richardson, of tech savvy, creative just to name a few. So yeah, the education is great, but you can’t ignore the community. It is an absolutely incredible group of women just like you. In fact, I’m pretty sure that anyone in the group will tell you that the community is the best part. Consider it your space to ask all the things, get all the support and make real life business besties. If you’re ready to join us, you can head over to Sabrina gebhardt.com backslash membership and enroll today. Now back to the episode. The first thing is, let’s just ask ourselves, like what is fear? And why do we experience it? Okay, like at the base? What, what is fear? Like, why is it a constant problem? Like, what’s the deal? Why can’t we get away from it?
So at its very core, our brain is protecting us. Okay, it is built to be scared as a protection mechanism. And if you think way back to, you know, cavemen, okay? They would become fearful, over simple things like, where are we going to find our food today? Are we going to be attacked by a predator today? Are the elements going to kill us? Do we have a place to live? Right? Like the most core things, safety, food health, okay? Fear was involved in keeping us safe, quite literally, right? Like, don’t go towards that huge predator, because it’s going to eat you run the other way. Or don’t sleep outside in the ice and the snow because you will die, right? Fear is quite literally our brains way of protecting us.
Okay. So when, you know, historically, we would come across something new or different. And immediately the reaction of the brain is, you need to be scared of this because we don’t know what it is. And that’s good. Again, it’s trying to protect us, it’s trying to protect us from getting eaten, from dying from starvation from the elements from being unsafe. Okay. However, we live quite different lives now than we did, you know, back as cavemen. And it’s not the same. But yet our brain still is wired the same way. New, and the unknown, is naturally terrifying to our brain. The only thing that our brain can understand is that right here today, where I’m sitting in my house, with my family, with, you know, my heater on and my cup of tea, and I’ve have a full belly from breakfast, and I’m healthy. And all of these things, where I am today, right now is safe, because I can process the fact that I am currently safe right now. I’m healthy, I’m taking care of, I have a roof over my head, I don’t have a predator and trying to knock down my door. I am physically safe right now. But when my brain starts to think about doing something new, doing something different, as fear gets in the way, because fear says Well, wait a minute, we don’t know how that’s gonna go. We don’t know how somebody’s going to respond to that change. We don’t know if people are going to like it or not. We don’t know if it’s going to feel good. Or if it’s going to hurt. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And so fear steps in and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We don’t want to do anything different.
We don’t want to do anything unknown, because that could be scary. That could be dangerous, right? So I just I want you to know that part of the picture about fear. Because when you can recognize that your brain is simply doing what it’s wired to do. You can tell it that it’s wrong. Right, you can tell it that it’s overreacting a little bit. And that’s the next part that I’m going to get to so when we are stuck in fear about something, especially when you’re looking at the big changes, doing something new making a pivot niching down, down drastically raising your prices, marketing to a new audience starting a new business or making a move any of those really big things. When fear starts to like, set off all the alarms and starts to paralyze you, the best thing that you can do is ask yourself, What’s the worst thing that can happen? What’s the worst case scenario here. And oftentimes, I’d say probably, in the creative entrepreneur space in the photography space, 99.9% of the time, you worst case scenario, you do the thing, you launch the thing, you raise the prices, you start the new business, you you know, fill in the blank, you will still be in the worst case scenario, if it’s a complete and utter failure. If it is just a complete and utter failure, worst case scenario, you will still be safe, your family will still be safe, your relationships will still be intact, you will still have a home, you will still have food, you will be healthy. All of the major things still have green checkmarks next to it. Okay, worst case scenario, maybe your ego gets bruised, maybe you’re out a little bit of money, if there was an investment involved, maybe you’re out some time, if you worked on something, maybe you just get knocked down, because it didn’t go quite as well as you had hoped. All of those things are okay. All of those things are things that you have, for sure experienced at some point in your past, and you have survived them all.
If you’re listening to this podcast today, I have great news for you. That means you have 100% success rate on overcoming failure. Did you hear that? You have 100% success rate on overcoming failure because you are still here today. You are still here. You are still listening. You are still doing the thing. So when you think about the worst case scenario, again, our brain naturally is trying to protect us from from from something terrible happening. But when you think about business decisions or life decisions, most of the time, we’re still going to be safe and healthy and cared for and loved. And the worst case scenario. isn’t that big a video. Okay. So when you let yourself think about and journal on what’s the worst case scenario, then you start to look at? Okay, sure, I would love for this new thing to be a huge success. But if it’s not, could I overcome my my ego getting bruised? Could I overcome losing a bit of an investment? Could I overcome losing some time? Could I overcome XYZ? Yes, you can, you can absolutely overcome it, you can get back up and try again. Right. So allowing yourself to think about what the worst case scenario is, can be really, really helpful exercise. Because that’s where we can start to tell our brain you know what, you are overreacting, you are quiet, causing quite a stir in my mind and in my body, and you’re creating this reaction to change and to possibility in such a negative way. But you know what? The worst case scenario is not all that negative.
And that’s where you can get the bravery to decide. Okay, I’m gonna go for it. Because this this worst case scenario is not that bad. On the flip side, I always encourage my students to ask themselves, what’s the best case scenario? Like we get so hung up on fear sometimes about change, and things that can grow us that we just let ourselves spiral on the negative and stead of letting ourselves spend some time focusing on the positive? What if everything goes, right? What if it’s the best case scenario? What if you immediately have just this incredible growth, this positive feedback, things just take off? What about that version? Because that’s quite possible as well. And if you do those two exercises side by side, the what’s the worst case and what’s the best case? Oftentimes, it is very clear at that point, that you would rather risk having the best case scenario than then what the worst of the worst case scenario is right? It becomes very clear at that point that it’s, it’s basically a win win situation.
So I have one last thing that I want to talk about and this is this is something that even once I have shared this information with coaching students, it still comes up okay, I get it. I’m I’m afraid of something I’m afraid of doing something, starting something changing something. I’m afraid of it. But I don’t need to be because my brain is just protecting me. Okay, Sabrina, I got that. And they work through worst case scenario, best case scenario, and they’re feeling a little bit lighter. But then the question is okay, but I’m still scared now what? The only way out of fear is to take a step forward. It’s the only way, it is the only way to prove to your brain that your brain is wrong. It is the only way to say, See, I told you, we’re safe, it’s okay to do this. And here’s a perfect example. If you are a mom, or even if you’re not a mom, if you’ve ever been at a public pool, or a hotel pool, or a resort pool, okay, and you’ve seen a young child, and they are either standing on like the edge of the deep end, and they’re wanting to like jump to their parents for the first time. Or there’s maybe they’re standing on a diving board. Okay. And again, it’s the first time what do we see, most of the time, when is the first time a child is trusting to jump into a big body of water or a deep end of water? There’s some serious beer. Okay. And, you know, I have three kids. And so I’ve seen this with all of my children when they were younger. And my oldest, was the worst, she struggled with fear. And I mean, I could do a whole podcast episode on this in a lot of ways. But what happened is, she would stand on the side of the pool.
And I’m standing there practically with arm’s reach, because I know that she’s going to jump in, I’m going to catch her. But she’s standing there. And the longer she stands on the edge of the pool, the deeper her fear gets, and her fear starts to overtake her, you can almost see this physical reaction. First you see it on her face, then you see her whole body tense up. And you can as a parent, I’m standing there and I’m trying to coerce her, I’m trying to tell her, it’s safe. I’m going to catch you, I’m right here, I promise, it’s going to be fun, you’re going to love it, you don’t have anything to be afraid of. Right? Like I’m trying to coerce her and talk her into doing the thing that she’s terrified of. But the longer she stands there, the less likely she is actually going to do it. Because the story in her head gets so big. It just turns from a little bit of fear into absolute panic and terror. Right? The longer she stands there first, it’s it’s fear, then she’s physically paralyzed, then there’s crying, then there’s screaming, then there’s completely abandon, she walks away. She’s not doing it. She’s absolutely refused. And this is what happens with us, the longer we stay stuck in this situation, when we are unwilling to do the work to work through it.
And we just stand there, the less likely you’re actually going to do it. Because now fear has taken over and you’re letting it win. The only way to move forward is to take a step. What happens when that young child finally jumps? They love it. And they realize that was an absolute blast. And here I am. I’m safe. Mom caught me. I’m okay. I want to do it again. And how does that happen? Because as soon as they jump, as soon as they took a step off the edge or off the diving board, they went through the process of shutting their brain down and saying, Look, you’re wrong. I jumped off the edge mom caught me, I’m totally fine. And I actually kind of liked it. And it’s the same with our businesses and with our lives. We have to take a step forward. Okay, one step, one tiny step forward is momentum. And as soon as you have momentum, and you can say to your brain, look, I took one step towards doing this thing towards making this change towards announcing this thing towards acting this way. Whatever. I took one step and I’m still okay. I’m still here. The world didn’t crumble, I didn’t die, it’s fine. Then you’ve got momentum, because then you can take another step and another step, okay.
Maybe you’re not diving straight off the deep end immediately. Maybe it’s baby step by baby step, but that’s okay. Because you have momentum. Momentum is what gets you through fear. That’s the only way. It’s the only way forward, you have to take a step. So, again, just to recap, I want you to think through where fear might be holding you back today. Maybe it splits Something big. Maybe it’s with something small. But where are you stuck? Where is fear affecting your life and your business? And then once you pinpoint that, spend some time journaling. What step can you take to move forward? Think about just one step. What is one thing you can do to move forward and gain momentum. And then allow yourself to journal on worst case scenario and best case scenario, and see if that lightens the pressure. See if that lightens the load, see if that inspires you and gives you a little bit more clarity. My hope is that after working through this exercise, you’ll see that it’s time to stop letting fear get in the way of who you really are. It’s time to live the life that you’re meant to live.
And you cannot do that if you are paralyzed in fear. My friend, you are meant for great things. And you’re meant to live a life of confidence and peace. And I really hope that today’s episode resonated with you. If it did, would you do me a favor? Would you share about it on Instagram and tag me I would love to repost you and support your business and I definitely want to spark up a conversation in the DMS. That’s it for today, my friend. We’ll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the shoot it straight podcast. You can find all the full show notes and details from today’s episode at Sabrina gebhardt.com backslash podcast. Come find me and connect over on the gram at Sabrina Gebhardt photography. If you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you hit that subscribe button and leave me a review. Until next time, my friends shoot it straight.
