How to Take Consistent Action in Your Business Even if you Feel Overwhelmed and Afraid.

WELCOME! AS A PASSIONATE ENTREPRENEUR WHO MENTORS THOSE WHO DREAM BIG AND YEARN TO BUILD A PURPOSE-DRIVEN business ACHIEVING MORE THAN THEY DESIRE… I’M REALLY GLAD YOU STOPPED BY.

Today we are going to talk about how you can get started on your goals and start
implementing strategies that are going to grow your business or get your business off the
ground. This is also relevant to an entrepreneur looking to start a business.
The below advice will help you to manage performance, even if you feel stuck,
overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.
I am going to break this down into two topics. Firstly, I will explain what fear is and secondly,
what causes overwhelm.
Fear is generally caused by a negative threat in which we assume will happen if we
undertake the task at hand. Meaning, if you have a lot of strategies in your business that are
going to expose you to people, but you feel fear, it could potentially be because you fear
being rejected. You may also have a fear of failure.
The brain will then create a fear response to make you feel afraid and make you feel like you
don’t know why you are setting out to do what you have planned to do. Fear is a way to
protect you from an unconscious threat in which you believe will happen if you undertake
that task.
Overwhelm is slightly different. Overwhelm in the brain is caused by a few beliefs. Some of
these include the belief I can’t cope, I can’t handle this. You can also feel overwhelm if your
capabilities don’t match the task at hand or the skill level that you need to execute that task

effectively. Overwhelm is a symptom of someone feeling like they just don’t know how to
do the task. They also don’t feel capable to do whatever skill is required or learn the skill
they need to take this step in their business.
How do you move past fear and overwhelm?
The first thing you can do is make a priority list of everything you need to do in your
business, whether this is branding, marketing, staff, advertising, collateral. Outline which
actions you think will improve your business.
Once you have done this, look at which task you think will be easier to do. You can then ask
yourself, what do I fear will happen if I do this task? Will your friends and family think badly
of you? Will people reject you or your business? Will you “fail”?
Many years ago, before I figured out how to remove certain beliefs like the fear of rejection
from my brain, I needed a strategy to help me get past fear to start a business. In these
days, I used to give advice to myself as if I was giving advice to a friend. I would talk to
myself for example and say it’s okay if you want to do that strategy but you’re not sure how
to. You can get someone to help you with the advertising or look at how someone else is
doing it and copy that. You could also do something that doesn’t expose you as much as
writing an email to your subscription list if that seems too daunting right now.
The first thing is to identify is what exactly you are fearful about. The second thing is to give
yourself some advice as if you would a friend. If the fear is way too overwhelming, skip
strategies that are going to expose you to that threat. For example, if you have a fear of
rejection and you are terrified of doing Facebook live videos, you will find that when you are
on camera, you seem to lose all the knowledge you had previously when put in the
limelight. This is a symptom of the fear of rejection. If this happens, don’t do the live videos.
This could simply wind up giving you a panic attack. Choose things that will be easier for
you. Some coaches will advise that you should push yourself out of your comfort zone. The
thing with this is when you keep doing this consistently and your thoughts aren’t able to
articulate what you are trying to say, it can come across as a forced script as opposed to
your authentic thoughts and feelings. It therefore won’t attract or connect to your audience
the way you would like to.
Try not to be so hard on yourself for your efforts. Some people teach that “these things get
easier with time”. This isn’t actually accurate. It doesn’t become easier with time, but rather
we become more disconnected because we learn to cope and dissociate with ourselves to
not feel the fear. We therefore lose connection to ourselves as opposed to start to feel good
about our business. It is much more important to understand what is causing us fear so we
can solve the underlying problem.
The second step is understanding what causes overwhelm. As previously mentioned,
overwhelm is caused by a feeling of your inability to cope or when your level of confidence
is not at the level of what the skill set is that you think you need to acquire.

A lot of people believe that what the mind can conceive, it can achieve. However, you are
not your mind and what actually deciphers whether you achieve something or not is your
confidence, not the mind. You are separate from the mind. If you feel like you can do it, you
can then lead your mind to create the ideas and start taking action.
A lot of people come to me and say they can’t even generate ideas. This is because they are
at a confidence level that is giving them ideas that are too far outside their comfort zone so
they don’t feel as if they can actually execute them. In this instance, what you can do is stick
to things you feel comfortable with. Perhaps things you have done before, then keep
excelling and mastering them.
The key to attracting clients and getting people into your overall business is indeed 70%
strategy and marketing. However, personal connection and 1:1 time with your clients is
much more powerful. Therefore, if marketing scares you to be that exposed, you can always
hold events and invite people to events and show them what you do there, if that’s what
you feel more comfortable with.
The thing about social media is not only does it expose us to friends and family but also to a
whole market of people who don’t know us. So, if you do have a fear of rejection, it will
trigger you to stay away from doing things like that.
If you are not struggling with fear or overwhelm but you are struggling with which task to
tackle first – I will let you in on a secret around the way the brain works. A lot of people use
lists so they will put all their tasks as to what they need to do down the list. If the brain
believes that business is hard, business needs to be hard, work needs to be hard – the brain
will not then tell you that you only need to take one step. It actually looks at the whole list
and says this is too much. It will then cause procrastination. If you suffer with this, what you
can do is to use a ladder system.
When I started my business, I made a ladder structure and I started with my goal. This was
to create a successful business that allows me to have financial freedom and location
freedom. That was my goal at the time. I was still studying and also had a job in the
corporate world. The time I had to work on my business was only 2-3 hours per night. So,
when I was taking action I had to make sure the tasks were a productive as possible towards
my goal. I therefore created a ladder with steps and put the steps of what I needed to do,
one above the other to show my strategic goals.
For example, firstly, get an ABN. Secondly, register a business name. I did the steps one at a
time. Although this was effective at the time, it didn’t reduce the anxiety I was feeling
around the workload. As I was extremely driven at the time, I focused all my time constantly
to thinking about what I needed to do. So even when I wasn’t working on my business, I was
still thinking about it. This is because when our brain has a to-do list, it stores unconscious
hooks around what we need to do and won’t feel at peace until it is done.
A way to combat the above, is to have post-it notes and on your note just write one task.
For example, “write an article”. You don’t need to focus on editing the article, fixing spelling

mistakes, adding keywords etc. etc. You simply need to write the article, nothing more,
nothing less.
Once you have done this, you can then go to the next task and so on. Post-it notes will save
you from being distracted. If you are like me, you may like to do multiple things at once. I
therefore need a strategy to manage one task at a time, to stay focused. This is a great way
to reduce overwhelm, reduce fear and get things done slowly.
Any task is dependent on the actions you take to finalise the big picture. If you can break the
tasks down as opposed to thinking about the entire big picture, it will make it easier for you
in the business process and you can stay focused.
Some of my business performance management clients are big picture type thinkers.
Meaning, some people thrive best in the details, others prefer to focus on the bigger
picture. What I do for these clients is I give them a small action but I let them know what it
will lead towards, so they can still see the bigger picture but can focus on the one task at
hand.
A lot of people will think they can’t curb their fear and it won’t go away. The strategy I have
described above will help to take action and start seeing some results for your effort.

Want to Hear More about getting more leads and client attraction