A few years ago I had a coaching client who was very fearful of all the things she had to do to start her own practice. She’d worked in the corporate world for many years, and had high-level skills, but when it came to representing herself and asking to get paid she was petrified.
At one of our first sessions she told me that she’d created two separate “To-Do” Lists. One was the basic record of all the things that had to be accomplished. But the other was a new variant altogether: an “Afraid To-Do List.” Here she had written down the steps she was too scared to take but that she knew would help her grow her business.
I’d venture to say that all of us have a running inventory of things that are just too alarming to add to our day-to-day tasks. Reach out to the acquaintance who intimidates me but could help me get my biggest contract. Learn that new technology. Raise my rates. Develop my public speaking skills. Quit my underpaying job.
These are the aspirational to-do’s that sit around in the dusty corners of our subconscious, the personal bogeymen (bogeypeople?) hamstringing our success and motivation. They seem so big and daunting that we don’t dare to think or speak them, much less write them down. These fears become the awkward furniture of our lives that we learn to maneuver around, as they impinge on our space and freedom. But they feel too heavy to move and so we just get used to living with them day after day, year after year.
I applauded my client’s strategy of making her fears manifest, and I figured that we’d work through the frightful list at some point down the line. But when we met a few weeks later something strange had happened. Looking back at her two lists, she realized that there had been an unexpected alchemy. The lists had co-mingled in her mind and, without even realizing it, she’d begun tackling her “Afraid”s. To my surprise and hers, she’d already crossed a few of the big baddies off, and was well on her way to vanquishing them all.
It turns out that just the act of writing down the scary things took a lot of their power away. Instead of dark shadows that sucked her confidence and energy she realized that they were just words on the page after all. Once they were converted to the neutral medium of pen and paper they became doable, manageable, even benign. So benign that she was able to accomplish things she’d thought were far beyond her capacity in a short time.
What my client realized is something all of us can learn: our fears are only as powerful as our minds allow them to be. They rise naturally when we challenge and stretch ourselves, but they don’t have to become lifelong roadblocks. By treating scary tasks as banal, no different from say, “Fold laundry,” she was able to move past years of paralysis into a much bigger vision of herself and her capacity.
I now encourage all my clients to write similar kinds of lists that reveal their deepest, most hidden fears. If we dust off our terrors and bring them to light they show themselves to be a lot less powerful than we imagine, like the monsters we were once convinced lived under our beds.
So, what’s on your “Afraid To-Do List”? And when will you be ready to write it down?
Great idea! I’m going to write this list too.