Marketing your business is usually what makes it feel real.

Going out there, posting about your offers. Sharing content with readers in hopes they find it useful. Attending conferences or networking events, meeting potential clients, talking about your business. That’s usually what does it. It starts to feel really real.

Guess what else happens?

You can get afraid.

Visibility and Moving Forward

For so many coaches, healers and creative entrepreneurs, their businesses are their soul’s work. And sometimes, when we move toward what our souls are longing for, we get afraid.

Afraid of what others will think. Afraid of failing. Afraid that there isn’t really a way to make what we long to do happen.  

And so, we stop. We move away. Until our soul’s whisper to us again. This. This thing here. This is what you need to do.

And so, we then often try to leave our emotions to the side, knowing we must conquer fear. (“Feel the fear and do it anyway!” “Fear is temporary. Regret is forever!”)

Powering Ahead

We think we should just be able to power ahead.

I come from a long line of power ahead-ers, push through-ers. You just toughen up and get to work. That’s what I learned and how I lived much of my life. The tricky part though about building your business from this place is it doesn’t often work that well. There are no external task masters, no neat sets of rules to follow, and doing our soul’s work and especially marketing it, brings up a lot of fear. 

The Stubborn Persistence of Fear

The truth is until you acknowledge that, see the fear for what it is and accept it, it will persist. It will keep showing up subtle ways that keep you from developing your business, from doing your heart’s work.

If you push it away, it will often persist in distraction. Which perhaps looks like fixing the backend of your website, because it needs to be done, for goodness sake, today. Doing that instead of creating that post telling people about your new offer.

If you push it away, it will persist in procrastination. Which might look like writing that blog article or content post AFTER you take another walk outside and look for inspiration. Just for a while.

If you push it away, it’ll persist in resistance disguised in rationalization. I need another class, for me to really reach my people. I need more healing, so I can really do this work and show up for my clients.

What I’ve discovered instead is that befriending fear works - and most of the time much better than just pushing through it.  Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this a lot in her book Big Magic.

Befriend Your Fear, Instead

One particularly effective way to do this is through personifying your fear through your writing. Turn it into a living breathing thing, and then try writing to it from your soul. Tell it what you want it to know.

So how, exactly, do you do that?

Here are seven easy steps

1. Find some time where you can be alone and uninterrupted. Bring your pen, your journal and a favorite beverage (Vanilla chai is one of my faves lately)

2. Take time to ground and feel into your heart.

3. Staying in that heart space, think about your project, something you’ve been working on, or maybe avoiding working on, and ask to be shown any fear that may be associated with this project.

4. Now, see what it feels like in your body or your mind’s eye. What do you see? What shape or color is it? Does it have an energy? Are there physical sensations associated with it? Write what comes to you as you try to describe the fear.

5. Now, ask it what its job is and how it is trying to help you. What do you see or hear in response? Write down whatever comes to you.

6. Ask what its name is. Go ahead and put down the first thing that comes to you.

7. Next, reread what you’ve written. What the fear looks, feels like. What it’s trying to do and what’s its name is. Now, write a letter to the fear. Be sure to acknowledge what you know about it, how it’s trying to help, but also use this opportunity to take time to tell it what you’re trying to accomplish, what you want to do with your soul’s work and how although you appreciate its presence, you need to get on with doing the work your meant to do on this earth.

Keep a copy of this letter to pull it out to read out loud any time you notice that fear might be stopping you from moving ahead on your soul’s work and doing the work you need to do to make your business visible.

By meeting your fear where it’s at, and not brushing it aside or trying to constantly struggle past it, you validate it, letting it feel comforted, safe.

And in the end, that’s really the best way to detach and move through it.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash