Fear, Growth & Reinvention
At age 38, I stumbled into tech marketing and reinvented my whole career.
I had just left the worst job I ever had, and had emailed everyone I knew that I was looking to make a change. A former colleague responded – he had gotten into tech marketing and needed help with some projects. “But I don’t know anything about tech…” I said. “It doesn’t matter – you’re going to be great.” he replied.
And he was right. But I spent a couple of uncomfortable years in “fake it till you make it” mode.
Even after I was doing well, I couldn’t seem to shake two things:
A nagging fear that I didn’t know what I was doing which caused me to be terrified going into every client meeting.
A vague sense that something was holding me back from being more successful.
Looking back, it’s amazing that I did not see how those two things were connected at the time.
After struggling with these feelings for awhile, I hired a coach, Christy Consler, to help me figure it all out.
In our intake session, Christy asked me lots of questions about my family and my upbringing. “But what does this have to do with my work?” I asked, a bit frustrated.
Christy explained that the challenges I was facing were likely related to my mindset, or negative beliefs and fears I had about myself. She explained that beliefs and fears we acquire throughout our lives can limit our progress and weigh us down at work.
We talked about how my mom grew up in extreme poverty, which was probably why she never seemed supportive of my entrepreneurial pursuits. “Why would you quit such a good job?” my mom would ask. This made me think that she didn’t believe in me. But the truth was, I was accomplishing things that were so far beyond her wildest dreams, that she couldn’t even get her head around it and was terrified that I would fail. With two young kids and a mortgage, she knew that wasn’t an option for me, and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t choose the stability of a corporate job.
Once I realized this with Christy’s help, I was able to let most of my fear go and my consulting business exploded and I became the go-to expert on C-suite selling and executive engagement. My work led to the idea for my company, Boardroom Insiders, and also helped me build the confidence I needed to establish and lead my own startup, which I ran for 14 years before selling it in 2022.
I wish I could say that those negative beliefs that once held me back are permanently gone. But the truth is that they creep back in more often than I would like - mostly when I am trying to create something new, or do something I have never done before, like writing and selling a book, for example.
But thanks to Christy, I know where they come from and how to push them aside so I can keep moving forward.
I was 40 years old before I realized that our parents’ experience controls our worldview until we take charge and form our own. And this epiphany was a game changer for me.
If you have thoughts and fears that are holding you back, it’s worth spending some time examining where they came from and doing the work to change them.