Moving Past BIG (and little) Fears..

I’ve held a BIG dream to gather a community of women to support each other in exploring our inner landscape with creativity for so long… and now that I’m getting closer to realizing this dream, I’m feeling sick to my stomach.

So much fear and worry and excitement has been bubbling up, I can hardly bare it.

I’ve been finding myself getting lost in thoughts, worrying about details that don’t really matter, worrying about whether people will want to join me, worrying that others are already building communities, worrying that my dream will fail…

Noticing this pattern, I started searching everywhere for help or tools or something to guide me in moving past all this to get back to focusing on what really mattered – taking steps to get me closer to realizing this dream of mine.

I’ve been fumbling for months; muddling through the fear and searching for answers, while still trying to get closer to my dream. That is, until today…

After sending out an OH SO SCARY, vulnerable email to a select few women, it hit me… I knew all along how to move past my fear and realize my dream. I’ve done it before. I could do it again.

And the answer is so much more simple than I had realized.

(And of course, this answer came from within, and not from my endless search for help. Oh how easy it is to forget that we have everything we need within! Sometimes we just need a simple reminder of the truth we have within us. Which is why I share my stories with you, and why I want to gather women to share even more stories.)

Anyway, back to the truth of moving past fear…

I realized that the answer was simple: Stay in the moment and take one tiny step at a time.

Simple. Right?

But it’s not so easy to remember when we’re caught up in fear, lost in our mind’s thinking. But when we finally remember… oh how powerful it is!

It’s the same technique I used to get myself across the country for my first scary trip alone. And it’s the same technique I teach in my class Roots to help others get past their creative blocks – to simply get present and focus on the one tiny step in front of us.

I like to think of my mind as a computer that can only think about the past or the future (which often generates fear, or uncertainty, or guilt, etc). But when we get present in the here and now, that’s the realm of the heart and our intuition. That’s where we’ll find the courage to move forward.

When traveling across the country alone, I was only able to get past my fear by telling myself to just focus on that next step: “Okay, all I have to do is pack my bag.” Then, “Okay, all I need to do is set my alarm for 6am.” Then, “All I need to do is get in the car.” Next, “All I need to do is drive to the airport.” And so on.

Putting hyper focus on the one tiny step in front of you… there’s no room to think about what might happen next. There’s no room for the fear to step in.

And when you have that level of focus and forward movement, there’s no telling what dreams you’re capable of accomplishing!

What one step are you willing to take next?

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about my upcoming community, send me an email! I’ll only be opening it to a small group of women to become the founding members as we grow the space. Will you be one of them?