5 SNEAKY SIGNS THAT FEAR IS RUNNING THE SHOW IN YOUR LIFE

Fear can be a sneaky little bastard, you know.

Strong opening line, huh?

But it’s true.

 The more I work with brilliant women, the more I see the sneaky, undermining ways that fear can creep into our lives and hold us back. I’m talking about the less obvious kind of fear.

Sometimes fear is very visceral; we feel it in our bodies. Our voice gets shaky, our adrenaline runs wild, we have flippy floppy feelings in our stomach when we start to take any kind of self-supportive action or move towards putting our own ideas or talents out there. Our body reacts in response to potential vulnerability to tell us to pull back, stay safe.

And then there are the sneaky ways that fear arrives; showing up in ways that we have convinced ourselves as ‘normal’ or ‘realistic’. These are the ways that seem to be more difficult to detect because we’ve spent generations observing them as the status quo for women or being conditioned to understand these patterns as “just the way it is” for us.

I want to identify five sneaky ways that I have seen fear show up in the lives of brilliant women like you and me and how they are stopping us from doing the things that we would love to do, create or offer in the world. 

HERE WE GO:

1) PLANNING PLANNING NEVER DOING

Any serial planners out there? I love to plan and map out an idea. I love systems and strategy and figuring stuff out behind the scenes. I can see how it would be easy to get stuck there. It feels safe in the back end of your idea, where you can let your imagination run wild and use up those TK Maxx notebooks and absorb all those free trainings you signed up for, right?

The truth is that when we get stuck in the planning stage, it’s often just plain old hiding. When we never feel like the thing is ready, when we are always adding bits or editing or doing more training or having another planning session we aren’t having to let any risk into our lives.

And it’s clever, because fear is fuelled by this. Fear wants to keep us safe from any kind of risk wether it be rejection or criticism or potential failure so hiding behind planning and never getting to the doing is the perfect disguise that fear can thrive in. 

Unfortunately though, fear has no interest in what it would feel like to be proud of something. Or what it would be like to feel fulfilled just because you did that thing. Or what it would be like to connect with others around your idea. Fuelling fear by staying behind your planning and research is a sure fire way to keep your ideas locked up forever.

2)    WORST CASE SCENARIO THINKING

There is nothing that fear loves more than you thinking about the potential of failure or rejection. It thrives in environments where your mind can catastrophise the worst possible outcome. When our default way of thinking is how terrible something is going to be or how impossible your idea seems, fear is having the time of its life.

The tricky part of this is that often we justify our worst case scenario thinking by calling it ‘realistic’. Which is a lie. True realistic thinking isn’t binary (terrible or fantastic, catastrophic or brilliant). Realistic thinking is curious and self-supportive.

Worst case scenario thinking is fears favourite place to hang out in your brain

3) TALKING TO THE WRONG PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR IDEAS

 Want to give fear a strong head start and kill a good idea fast? Start talking to your relatives about your plans.

Seriously.

When we are working on something precious to us, it’s so important to know who we should be sharing those ideas with.

More often than not, the people closest to us will a) want to keep us safe from any kind of risk or project their own fears onto us and b) are not the demographic of people that we are trying to connect with and won’t give us much feedback that is useful.  Of course it’s important to involve our loved ones in our plans when it might effect them, but be aware that sharing too much with them might give fear an opportunity to thrive and cause you to question what you’re doing.

4) IT’S GOING TO BE TOO HARD, WHY START?

So sneaky. Again, one of the ways that fear takes over is by making up stories in our heads to convince us that we are not up to the task. We stop before we start. We see the big picture ahead and, well, it’s going to be hard. Hard to fit into our life, hard to learn, hard to market, hard to plan, hard to finance. We shut our ideas down before they even have a chance to breathe.

When we stop before we start we are forgetting that we are evolving creatures. Our lives will change. Our circumstances will evolve. What feels unattainable right now might not in a few months or years. Giving up or shutting our ideas down is not the solution. SELF SUPPORT is. Curiosity IS. Asking ourselves “What is a small step I can take in the direction of this idea right now that will work with the context of my life?” or “How can I do something regularly that will give me the same feeling I am after from this bigger goal or idea?” 

Stopping before we start is also detrimental to our well-being because shutting our ideas down causes shame and resentment within ourselves and usually towards others. That disappointment is always channelled elsewhere – it does not just evaporate. It will feed into our relationships and other things we are committed to and we will end up associating those feelings with the idea that once brought us to life.

5)    YOU ARE CONSUMED BY WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING

Are you watching someone else’s journey really closely? Are you checking in on their work, their numbers and stats? Are you looking at what they are doing and feel deflated or jealous or even a little bit irritated? First off, welcome to being human.

Secondly, fear is loving this. Fear is feasting on your fixation. Fear knows that as long as you are distracted, comparing, obsessing over someone else’s work or life then it’s able to keep you from doing what YOU were created to do, which is just fine with fear.

Fear wants you to think that money is scarce, clients are scarce, attention is scarce, customers are scarce, space at the table is scarce. That way, you’ll either just hold back or armour up.

Can you identify with any of this? I know I’ve been there, totally unaware that so much of my mindset was conditioned towards fear and staying small.

This doesn’t have to be ‘just the way it is’ for women. It can’t be. Because we need you in the world. We need creative, innovative, empathic women showing up and making an impact.

So what can we do? Can we just banish fear with some sort of pagan ritual or something?

Unfortunately not. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we can make fear our friend. We can find work-arounds for fear and how it shows up in our lives. We can move through fear, seeing it for what it is and what it’s trying to do (keep us safe). We can have a healthy, empowered relationship with fear that actually propels us into action so we can do the things that we feel called to do in the world. Sound good? Don’t you want to get to that stage of understanding how fear shows up and knowing how to manage it so you can be more true to yourself?

There is so much to say about this so I’ve put together a free PDF with some really practical, helpful tips to help you move through fear AND! I’m going to be hosting an online Masterclass on Facing Fear on Wednesday, October 16th at 8pm BST – sign up up below to get more details and reminders!

INFLUENCE: 7 LIFE-CHANGING THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW

The idea of influence is intriguing to me. I’m on a bit of a quest at the minute to explore what it means in culture today; to break open the word and dig out all the flesh that we have put around it and try to find out what is at its core – the real juicy stuff.

And I’m getting somewhere. Somewhere surprising. And it’s exciting to lift the layers and see what’s underneath all the trappings of influence that we have created for ourselves. (sidenote: what we have created - not wonderful)

You see, for the majority of my career I have been involved in activism work. Working with charities, running charity projects, advocating, lobbying, creating movements for change. I’ve met people along the way that have shaped my idea of influence. I’ve witnessed a hunger for influence in the social justice sphere and been fascinated at how the power dynamics work when working for systemic change. I’ve seen what it takes for shifts to happen in the policy room or the campaign planning session; how influence is used – in healthy and unhealthy ways. Yes. The non-profit sector is not always healthy. Activism is not always healthy. Crazy, right?

In the last few years I’ve also been building my own business, one that largely operates online. I believe that my business has the same values as my non-profit work – empowering, advocating and opening conversations about systemic issues that have held women and girls back and creating connections so they can flourish – but this time my medium for this work has changed. I’ve been immersed in the world of social media, working to have my message heard there, connecting with others who are doing the same. To have influence in this sphere has certain trappings associated it and what is held up as influential has sometimes left a lot to desire. For me, anyway.

Both of these worlds have been fascinating to be part of and what influence looks like and what it takes to acquire it are very contrasting from one to the other. Not better. Not more effective. Just different.

In one world, influence is largely about who you know at the top.

In the other world, influence is largely about how many people are looking.

In one world, influence is about needing to be an expert in your field.

In the other world, influence can be gained by staging expertise or by learning as you go.

In one world, influence is mastered by having firm boundaries.

In the other world, influence is largely gained by blurred personal/private lines.

There are so many contrasts to it all and so my interest has piqued over time.

How does influence work so differently in one area to another?

Are there common threads that run through both?

And then, just to make things super interesting - last week I asked my friends on Instagram to think about who has truly been influential in their lives. I wanted to know what the top qualities of that person were that made them so significantly influential to them.

The answers to this came in thick and fast and it would seem that the people who have been incredible influences on our lives are quite close to our minds, easy to recount.

I paid close attention to the responses and what fascinated me was that there were some reoccurring themes. Themes that I’ve been sorting through to make sense of.

What occurred to me in sifting through this all, these personal lived experiences of being influenced by someone else is that influence isn’t actually about what happens on the outside.

Influence is an inside job.

Being a person of influence isn’t something that you can cajole or project - it’s an inner work that makes it’s way out.

As I work through all the data and the interviews and research, I wanted to share with you seven LIFE-CHANGING things that are emerging in my findings about the inside out idea of influence. I’ll be unpacking these more over the coming weeks but for now, just read them and absorb. Be challenged and hopeful. Find your own

1. Influence isn’t actually about outer platforms – it’s about an inner posture.

2. Influence isn’t about momentary notoriety – it’s about long-term dedication.

3. Influence isn’t about power – it’s about contribution.

4. Influence isn’t about reach, it’s about depth.

5. Influence isn’t about accumulation, it’s about generosity.

6. Influence isn’t about perfecting who we are, it’s about becoming who we are.

7. Influence isn’t about striving, it’s about ease.

These are life-changing truths because they tip our cultures idea of influence on it’s head.

Influence is getting rebranded, my friend and it’s happening here.

We don’t have to wait for numbers and figures to have an impact. We don’t have to show up perfectly or expertly or loudly. We get to have an impact. We get to do the inner work that brings integrity back into a world that so badly needs some. Are you with me? Isn’t that an enormous relief to hear?

I’m going to be sharing lots more about influence over the next number of weeks because I think it’s a conversation worth having. I’m going to be hosting an online workshop in October that will fully lay out all of my findings and give a bit of a new blueprint for influence that I think will be really inspiring and hopefully create lots of discussion and opportunity for learning.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop about that – stick your email address in in the box below so you’ll be the first to know about it all!

5 SUBTLE WAYS WOMEN ARE SELF-SABOTAGING

I’m here for some straight talking today, folks. If I could write this whole blog post in CAPS and be sure it wouldn’t hurt your eyeballs, I would.

In all the work I’ve done with women of all ages and backgrounds over the last decade, there have been some emerging themes of self-sabotage that I have seen with my own eyes; some particular ways that I see brilliant women like you and I tripping ourselves up repeatedly over and over again.

Firstly, I want to lovingly say that this is the stuff of being human. These ways that we minimise ourselves, hand over power, get swept up and let fear lead the way – these things do not make you faulty – they make you human. The first step to being able to move beyond them into a truer sense of who you are is owning them; acknowledging that this stuff is real for you. That’s a biggie. So I want you to read this with an open mind, willing to see where it is that you might recognise yourself.

Let’s jump in. Below are five ways that I have repeatedly seen women sabotaging their own fulfilment and desires and holding back the progress of the sisterhood:

1)    Assuming there is not enough room for you.

Somewhere along the way, we have been fed the lie that when we see someone else doing something we would love to do that it automatically disqualifies us from doing it. Somewhere along the way we have picked up the message that there is not enough room for our version of the same thing. Somewhere along the way we have decided that if someone else is doing it, they now have the monopoly and they must be doing it better. In addition to that, we often fold in the double whammy lie that if we do decide to do something similar that people will think we are copying, we’ll be unlikable, talked about and thought of as a fraud or second rate. So we shut the idea down immediately, tuck in back in our safe zone, we retreat and let resentment and jealousy wash over us.

When we think like this, we are operating out of a scarcity mindset. This is the mindset that says that there is not enough space for us all to move around and be ourselves. This is the mindset that has us moving through the world believing that everything is a race, that competition is rife and that spaces for creativity, fulfilment and innovation are limited.

What we need are women who are willing to see past these lies, who give themselves permission to learn, try and grow and create environments for others to do the same. When we assume there is a limited amount of room for women to do the things that they are drawn to, we make the world smaller for ALL women when in reality, we have an unlimited amount of space to expand and stretch as we need to.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Acknowledge your own desires. Write them down and then tell a trusted friend. Do some light market research. Practice your craft or your offering. Arrange to meet up with someone who triggers jealousy or scarcity in you. Reach out to them and tell them how brilliantly they are doing.

2)    Recruiting other women to your pain.

The second way I see women self-sabotaging (and this is a biggie) is by recruiting other people to our pain. We’ve all been there on one side or the other. Wounded people tend to want to rally other people to their cause. If we have been wronged by another woman, misunderstood or failed – the temptation is to bring our people along for the ride. We want solidarity in our pain, to have an ally. Real alliance does not look like taking down the sisterhood because of our own fears or pain.

A few months ago I was faced with this. Someone I love had been hurt by another woman and they were in pain. They were so consumed with their own discomfort over it that they wanted me to join them. They really tried to get me in there in the pit with them. There was even a moment when they couldn’t see past themselves and tried to give me my own (personal) reason to join them in their annoyance, but I could see what was happening and I was able to call it out. My friend responded so bravely and quickly realised what she was doing. We talked it out so she felt understood and seen without adding more pain to the mix.

Don’t look for solidarity in bringing other women down. Stop trying to find someone to dislike the same people as you. One of the most powerful ways that patriarchy can thrive in our world today is when women turn on each other and recruit each other to sides. We can disagree, we can find fault, we can be hurt and hurt back, but let’s not try to grab each other in from the sidelines to join in our pain. This is the kind of sabotage that ripples out and breeds insecurity like a disease.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Give other women the benefit of the doubt when you hear things about them. Deal with your own pain. Redirect conversations that would tempt you to get involved in petty talk or that try to drag you into mutual disdain for someone. Challenge negative talk. Be obnoxiously supportive of other women.

 3)    We are not taking ourselves seriously.

Another subtle way I can see women self-sabotaging is by seriously underestimating themselves. I can see clearly where this comes from: if we take ourselves seriously, invest in things, put ourselves out there and it doesn’t work out – then we have egg on our face and everyone will know. If we stay in the shallow, never invest fully, never talk about our offerings with any intensity or authority then we stay safe. No one can shame us.  

The thing about not taking ourselves seriously is that we never move from that place. There is nowhere to go from here. We are stuck. And that stuck-ness will eventually spill out into resentment, frustration, grief and heartache. We will never realise our fuller potential. We will never fail and learn. We will never find the true fulfilment that comes from giving things our best shot and growing along the way.

If you are not investing in your own betterment, if you are shying away from opportunities that will bring discomfort, if you are downplaying what you do or hiding it away from the world – fulfilment is going to be a really hard reach for you. There is rarely any comfort to be found in growth. Take yourself seriously. Take your own growth and fulfilment seriously and watch how you evolve.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Invest in yourself; even something small. Take a course, join a facebook group, book into a workshop, tell people about your products or services. Eliminate minimising language from how you talk about what you do: “my little business” or “just my side-hustle”. (You can also grab my FREE 30 Days of Visibility Instagram prompts to help you talk about the things you have to offer, build community and communicate the ideas you have stored up).

4)    Making our minds up about what other people will pay for, engage with or buy.

We are SO good at assuming we know what people are thinking. We are EXCELLENT at making up whole scenarios and thought processes about how we will be perceived, what other people’s buying habits are, their budgets, their interests, aren’t we?

Some of us are so quick to write off our own ideas, sabotaging them before they get out of the gate that we have never let our ideas out into the air to breathe so they stay within us, choking us up. Let me tell you, there is a whole WORLD out there of people who need to hear what you have to say, who may need to hear things from your perspective to find healing, who may need to engage with your product to find a solution to their problems.

The ever-expanding ways that people are able to consume or connect with things in the world today means that we just cannot write off who might be interested in what we have to offer. If there is something burning in your soul that you feel drawn to put out into the world, you owe it to yourself to set it free. We cannot control who buys it or who can afford it or if it will sell – we simply have to be true to the thing that we are being called to do.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Do your research! Ask your target market about the things you are considering offering. Use social media to build community and offer value to the people in your orbit. GET SOME INFORMATION! Stay curious and open to possibilities. Stay true to your pricing. Don’t look around at what other people are charging for things (they could have major issues around this stuff as well!) – figure out what you want to offer, how much it costs you to make or produce and what you want to be paid and then ASK FOR IT!  

Finally… 

5)    Being consumed by perfectionism.

Oh my goodness, I get this one. I totally do. I am a recovering perfectionist. It is hard work. It has cost me a lot to be consumed with perfection and striving.

Let me give you a little example: Just this year I finally decided to turn my e-course ‘Down to Earth’ into a book to sell on my website. I spent ages going through the content, compiling it and converting it into a PDF. I agonised over fonts and settings and colours. Finally I let it out into the world and a bunch of people bought it! I made some money from it!

Then I went through it again recently and you know what – there’s a whole paragraph missing on one of the pages. A whole freaking paragraph, just sitting there, half written.

Two years ago this would have crippled me and kept me up at night – hopelessly obsessed that people would think I was a fraud, that I was unprofessional, that I wasn’t to be trusted (the drama of my inner critic is obscene). Two years ago me would have taken it down from my website right away and had it redone and made a big public apology to all my readers and resent it to them again.

This time, I just cringed and then laughed. Of course there was a mistake in it! It was 80 pages long and I’m not a professional editor. It’s one tiny paragraph and it doesn’t take anything away from the overall goodness of the book. It’s still on my website, still for sale, in all it’s imperfect glory.  

If you are waiting around for the perfect website, perfect branding, perfect whatever before even dipping your toe in the waters of the thing you want to do then can I please encourage you to stop and just start. This perfectionism is a guise for hiding. This need to get everything just ‘so’ before you present it to the world is wasting your precious life minutes and is just fear showing up in a different outfit.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Set yourself deadlines for doing things and STICK TO THEM! No more pushing back timings because of polishing things endlessly. If something feels too big and you’re really not ready, find a smaller way to get it out there in the time being. Go for good enough when you can. Don’t be a slave to an algorithm. Try and inject some spontaneity into your day. Look back and reflect on how far you have come. Make a point to celebrate small milestones. Remember your own humanity and the humanity of others. Give yourself a freaking break.

Do you see yourself in here anywhere? Is there a part of you that might be self-sabotaging and wants to move through it? Leave me a comment and let’s chat it out. I am SO here for women who want to move through some of these sabotaging behaviours and mindsets. I need these reminders in my life too. It is not easy to look this stuff in the eye and own it but we desperately need women in our world who know how to evolve with grace and dignity. We need women in the world who can see their own BS and decide that they are done with it and ready to shed the skin they are in and become truer versions of themselves.

ASSEMBLY SPRING/SUMMER GATHERING 2019

Another Assembly Gathering has come and gone and I can’t wait to tell you all about it…

These Gatherings are like markers in the year for me - signifying the beginning of a season, a punctuation mark to welcome in something new. They take months to plan and it feels like they are over so quickly so I love to be able to record it all here and keep the memories of these special days alive.

This year for our Spring Summer Gathering I wanted to host it somewhere fresh, somewhere peaceful, somewhere that immediately felt like a retreat from the daily grind and the chaos of life. It didn’t take me long to know that Origin Community Farm was going to be that space. From the very first time we went to check out Origin as a family - a working flower and vegetable farm, cafe and community space - I felt at home. The team that run the space are some of the very best people you could know. They care deeply about what they do, they are creative, insightful, welcoming and generous and the space they have created was just the ticket for gathering almost 30 women together to eat, drink and escape routine for a while.

I’ll give you a quick overview of the day, but really these pictures from Ruth of Native Ivy do the talking for me. It’s so special to have the moments captured by such a brilliant photographer - I’m sure you’ll agree…

Everyone arrived to Origin and were welcomed with a seasonal botanical cocktail, mixed up by our in house mixologist for the day - Laura Turley. We had beautiful fresh canapes from The Edible Flower and settled into chatting to new people, bathing in the sunshine of the garden and getting familiar with the goats and chickens in the yard.

That’s me giving important information like who to talk to if the bog roll runs out…

Then everyone split off into two workshop spaces - half the group heading into the cafe space for a floral crown workshop with the lovely Vicky from Origin and the other half heading into the flower polytunnel with Laura to mix up some botanical cocktails. The groups then switched over so everyone had a chance to do both workshops. Everyone immersed themselves fully and it was so great to see all the variations of beautiful floral crown creations - from big Frida Kahlo style headdresses to dainty earthy crowns; it was pretty stunning! Even those that came thinking they didn’t have a creative bone in their body soon left chuffed with what they put together when they had the right tools and time to get on with it. Sometimes that’s all we need eh? The foraged cocktail class was a big hit too - lots of homemade garnishes and infusions were sampled and Laura was a wealth of knowledge on how simple it is to create impressive cocktails from natures bounty.

After the workshops and JUST as the rain and wind began to howl, we crowded into the polytunnel to sit down for dinner. We dined on three incredible courses put together by The Edible Flower - each one sublime. Nettle and nutmeg soup, dulse soda bread with local Abernethy butter, all the seasonal salads loaded with colour and flavour and the most delicious carrot and goats cheese tart tatin. The wine flowed and we finished up with a dreamy summer fruit pudding and geranium cream, lounging around the big table like the Floral Queens that we are. It was so lovely (and my favourite moment of these events) to look up and down the table at the diverse group of women gathered - many strangers before this day - all making connections and finding common ground.

I’m so grateful to have had a BRILLIANT team to help me put this Gathering together - especially the amazing Steph from This Old Home who took care of all the details, knew exactly how and when and what to get to bring my ideas to life. Steph worked really hard to source the right stuff and make sure everything looked and felt beautiful - from the styling of the workshop spaces to the tablescape and outdoor areas. I’m so grateful to get to work with women who are creative, warm and dedicated.

All the little details matter and we had beautiful linen napkins in a gorgeous light grey provided by Magic Linen and they set the tone of the earthy table so perfectly. The little linen goodie bags were an extra treat and were filled with organic, eco toiletries from local eco retailer Bamboo & Beeswax and a beautiful organic cotton food bag provided by Tracy from BTS Concept Store in Coleraine. Menu’s were designed and printed by Natalie at Keady Row.

The beautiful hand-painted ‘Gather’ banner was made by Kate Morrison and pulled the whole space together, dontcha think?

The night was coming to a close before we knew it and we huddled around the firepit with mint tea and lavender biscuits. One by one, everyone headed home, taxi’s arrive and just like that it was over!

A huge thank you to everyone who helped out, especially the magnificent team at Origin who let us have full run of their space for the day. And to the women who came to the Gathering, and the women who continually support Assembly in many many ways - thank you. YOU are the heart and soul of Assembly.