Have you been listening? Listening to that voice inside telling you about your goals? Sometimes the voice we hear is small, and other times, it is a constant shouting from the person we know we are meant to be. Yet we don’t do a thing to become her. But why??

Fear is the number one contributor to our reason for not making movement on our dreams and our future. This post is going to walk you through my own personal journey and real-life experiences with handling fear. Plus, juicy in-depth homework to get you thinking about, and acting on your fears right now.

Work Through Your Fear To Finally Accomplish All Your Goals

When I look at other people not accomplishing their goals, there are a lot of reasons you can peg for it. But when you come down to it, a lot of it is your fears, what you keep in your brain. There are three big things I will give you today to help you work through your fears and inevitably become the person you want to be. 

This idea in your mind, this dream and this vision are desires, wants, and things you think about on repeat. As you are reading this, it is probably coming to the front of your mind and tapping on the window or beating on the door. For some of you, it is faint. For some, it is much louder. It is there for you to take. There is no reason why you can’t or why you shouldn’t. I don’t know what made me say go, but I just reached this point where enough was enough.

How to Move Forward With Your Goals

Here are the three things I want you to know for how to move forward on something you feel hesitant to move forward on. Even the smallest things. You want to do so many things to be the person you see in your mind. You must know you are aligned, and you are called to be that person, not just some one-off random, whimsical thing. 

It needs to be a whisper or a gentle nudge; for some, it may be shouting at this point, where you are on the spectrum. There are things you want to be doing that you aren’t doing. It may be something physical, like you want to take a shift in becoming vegan, getting rid of wheat in your life, completely committing to a minimalist lifestyle, or starting a business.

Does This Goal Make Sense For Your Life Right Now?

You need to know if this is something you are really called to do right now or if it sounds fun but doesn’t make sense for your life right now. There are a lot of times you will make excuses to put yourself in the camp of “it just doesn’t make sense right now,” but they actually aren’t legitimate reasons, and you may just be afraid, but it actually is the right time. 

Your mind will try to trick you because our brains are programmed and are there to make us feel safe. When we try to push that boundary, our brain is honestly made to keep us from feeling afraid and keep us away from danger. It doesn’t know the difference between danger like we are going to cut ourselves, and danger, like we are going to get made fun of, or danger, like we are going to lose a thousand bucks. Whatever those fears come up when you want to become that person you want to be. You have to know which camp you are in.

“Your mind will try to trick you because our brains are programmed and are there to make us feel safe. When we try to push that boundary, our brain is honestly made to keep us from feeling afraid and keep us away from danger.”

I am going to help you with these three tips. This is how you are going to know if this is just your fear and that is why you are not moving on it, or is it really just not the right time? That is the first thing I want you to determine. If you are unsure, the answer will be clear by this end. Then, go into these three things.

Tip #1 to Achieving Your Goals: Imposter Syndrom

Here is the first huge tip that no one really gave me, but I read about it. I was constantly learning and reading and watching, I had really cued into these feelings inside myself that I could tell were really the problem. I started learning more about it. This is the first thing a lot of you may have heard about. It’s called imposter syndrome. This is the idea that says, “Who am I to do this?”.

Let’s use the example of starting a business or creating that Etsy shop you want to create because you can create really cute greeting cards. You sit there and say to yourself “I have no graphic design experience, I have no idea how to do anything related to business, and I don’t even know how I would learn how to do it”. But you know that all you aim to do is create greeting cards for people, you put them in your kid’s lunch boxes, you put them on people’s doorsteps, you send them in the mail just because and people love them.

But these ideas start to come up in your head that you can’t, you aren’t good enough, you shouldn’t, all because you don’t value what it is that you can do as much as you do when you are comparing yourself to someone else. You are always looking at what someone else is doing and comparing yourself to that.

My Struggle With Imposter Syndrome

When I had this wild idea that I wanted to start a blog, I told Blane, and he asked what I wanted to talk about. I had jotted a few ideas down. Capsule wardrobing organization was super interesting to me, and I really love meal planning and feeding your family well. So, I just jotted these things down. I went back and looked at it and thought, what the heck? I know nothing about capsule wardrobing. This is what I would say to myself. 

I went on Pinterest and started creating these boards and trying to learn more about it. I would try to justify the comparison. Look at this person’s capsule wardrobe blog. There is no way. I don’t have the backdrop for that, I don’t have the cute little rack, I don’t actually have a capsule wardrobe, and not every single top and bottom matches my other tops and bottoms. I don’t have that, so I can’t teach about capsule wardrobing—end of story.

How to Beat Imposter Syndrome to Reach Your Goals

You will go through that over and over again. Here is what you do. First of all, I want you to look at yourself right now and list out 20 things you are good at and that you like to do. For me, I’m actually really good at creating and swapping between wardrobes between two seasons here. I’m really good at it, and I have taught a lot of friends to do it. So I wrote it down.

If you are good at cooking, there are going to be a lot of other people who are really good at cooking. If you have ever watched Joanna Gaines’s cooking show Magnolia Table, she specifically says she went through massive amounts of imposter syndrome and talked about this literal example of how insecure she felt because everyone else seemed to know more. She didn’t know what things were called, she didn’t know the name of the specific cut, she just called things “a thing,” and it took her time to gain confidence. This is my mega tip to get rid of fear. Smash it with confidence. Now how do you do that? Start with this list of 20 things you are good with and start putting it out into the world.

Be Laser Focused on What You Are Good At

If you go back in my archives, I set up an iPad and recorded myself going through each item in my capsule wardrobe. Everything about it is terrible. I literally was using a ladder and a board and guess what, doing it gave me confidence. There may be three likes on the video, but you know what, it helped me and gave me confidence. All you have to do is look at the list of things you are good at and be laser-focused on those things. 

No one else is going to do a capsule wardrobe like me, not like Susie Q over there, who only buys neutrals so they all go together. Other people want to know how to create capsule wardrobes that have stripes, and polka dots, and pinks and greens, blacks, blues, yellows, they want to know how to do that. If you want to know how to put greeting cards out into the world and someone else knows how to do that a lot better than you, guess what, they don’t have that special view of the world like you do.

Your Fears Are Holding You Back From Reaching Your Goals

Maybe you love the outdoors, so all of your greeting cards have nature infused in them. No one else has that, only you. If you are worried about the fact that you are going to go into CrossFit and you are going to be this tiny twig that doesn’t even know how to lift a barbell, ok, who cares? I don’t have to look at anyone else; just focus on me. Maybe you are really good at running outside, but you want to try a new thing. Maybe you want to start working out at the gym. Great, do it. Who cares if she has LuLu Lemon on, who cares if you got your shoes at the Goodwill, I do. I really don’t care. And neither should you. 

You will go and stand at the treadmill for 5 minutes and not know what buttons to push, but you know what? The next time you go, you will remember what buttons to push, and you will know that you need to hop off with both feet before you push stop because it could be really bad. I’ve done it before.

This whole thing with imposter syndrome is really just your brain’s way of keeping you safe, that is what fear is just in general. But I hope you know you are uniquely designed with all of these things. That is why if you take these top 20 things you are really good at, start picking out the ones that mesh together well and just start doing them. Whatever it feels like you should be moving forward with, it’s what is going to get you there and become that next version of you.

Tip #2 to Achieving Your Goals: Cliff Jumper

Here is the second part. I call it the cliff jumper. It is where, if you had ever gone cliff jumping before or dived off a diving board, it’s like you know it sounds fun, but then you get to the edge, and you wait, and you psych yourself out, and you get afraid then you become the cliff jumper that doesn’t jump. This kind of fear can actually creep up at any given moment, even on the smallest things. 

I recognize this happening to me. I’m sitting on it right now in my business, I am in a mastermind with some peers, and one of the girls knows me pretty well and keeps telling me to give her a date. I don’t know why this has become me. I was so good about just jumping and executing one thing after another. Now, a year and a half in, all these things are here because I did not sit. I got better at knowing what that disgusting feeling was going to be like, and I just jumped.

Take The Leap and Jump for Your Goals

Some of you are going to be in this spot, and here is what I want you to do. I want you just to do. Don’t think. This is very hard, especially for people like me. I want to think through everything thoroughly every time. A lot of times, we want to think thoroughly through everything in order to create excuses for why we aren’t supposed to do it.

That is what I want you to stop doing. I want you to stop thinking about it and just do it. If you are already to the point that you made up your mind that you want to do this thing, just don’t think about it. When the thought creeps in, replace it with another thought. Keep reminding yourself it will be ok. Pick one thing you can jump on this week that you have been sitting on and have been afraid to do.

Tip #3 to Achieving Your Goals: Stop Self-sabotage

The worst thing that can happen is you could either succeed or fail. This is the one I like to call self-sabotage. Once you have gotten into this place where you are ready to jump, you have worked through imposter syndrome; you are in this good place. Then your brain will kick in and start telling you all the reasons this is a bad idea to keep you safe and from failing. 

For some of you, the biggest fear that your brain feels is the fear of success. Maybe you feel both for different reasons, but I want you to think about what is really going to happen if you do this thing. Are you afraid to fail? Or are you afraid to succeed? For some, this can get a little muddled in our brains; don’t overthink this too much.

When you are thinking through this and looking at what this fear is and why you are not moving forward in it, something will really pop out in your mind, and I want you to listen to those thoughts that come up. I want you to really feel this out. For me, when I look at it, and even still sometimes, and for a lot of women, they will stop themselves. I just listened to it in the academy. One of the biggest fears that kept coming up was that they were afraid to jump into the academy because they didn’t know if, on the other side of success, they believed the program would get the results they wanted and that success in their life scared them.

Will I Like Who I Become When I Reach My Goals?

Is that not the most contradictory thing? But we do it all the time because then we have to ask ourselves, can I function as that new person that I am dreaming of becoming? It’s scary, unknown, unfamiliar. So our brain says don’t go, it’s unsafe, don’t be there. How will you pay your bills if you leave your 9-5 and you start this job? How will you end up being there for your kids every morning if you ask your husband if you can do the gym and he gets the kids ready for school? Will my kids be safe? Will my kids get fed the right food? What will happen if my body changes? Then we start thinking about all of these things.

We commit to becoming, have worked through a lot of stuff, and are ready to do it; we get to a point where our brains stop and think, what happens if I succeed? What happens if I start doing all of this? Then there is the other camp: what happens if I fail? What if I jump and I do this and hit the shallow water? We start going through the worst-case scenario and exaggerating the outcome so much in order to convince ourselves to stop doing it.

What Camp Are You In?

I want you to really think about which camp you are in. Determine which of these is really holding you back and write it down. Then, I want you to ask yourself why. Why are you afraid of succeeding at this thing? When you play out in your mind what life looks like at the end of this thing, and the result has happened, it’s what you wanted, and it’s happening. Why does that scare you? Write it down. Hash it out. Then, when it doesn’t go according to plan, and you have this failure, I want you to write down the worst thing that could happen. When you look at those fears and you ask yourself why, I want you to give the opposite answer. Refute what it was that you came up with.

Bonus Tip to Achieving Your Goals: Choose the Positive Outcome

Here is the last bonus takeaway for you. When I heard this, everything changed for me. “There is no more truth in the positive outcome than there is in the negative outcome that we create in our minds.” When you tell yourself the negative outcome and turn around and tell yourself the positive outcome, there is no more validity or truth in one of those over the other. 

You have a choice to believe that the true answer is the one that is positive versus believing the one that is negative. You have the choice. It hasn’t happened to you, so you can’t determine what to believe. Why not choose to believe in what you know you are called to do and believe it will be successful? When you make that choice, you squash fear’s ability to control your decisions anymore because you choose to believe in what it actually is. You know you are called to do, and you are shutting the door on those fears.

I am looking forward to seeing your homework in the Facebook group. Be brave and bold, and let’s smash those fears together. You can also come to check out The Systemize Your Life Academy and work on smashing those fears with some other amazing ladies! We can’t wait to see you there!

Frequently Asked Questions

I love the idea of a legacy statement but are there any day to day suggestions you have for systemizing your marriage?

Sure do. The first thing I want you to realize is that you need to be intentional with your time. If you haven’t discovered my Fundamental Needs (yes…there is a free workbook!) start there. Make sure that you prioritize your marriage within your fundamental needs.