Lessons - Why You're Too Scared To Pursue Your Dreams | Ben Nemtin, a #1 New York Times Bestselling Author

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. So three points that I want to go into, three points that can inhibit your success, right? Fear, deadlines, waiting to feel inspired. So can you go into those a little bit deeper and then can you walk through how you would suggest somebody overcome these three main blockers for getting started and then succeeding at living your own bucket list and your own buried life? Yeah. So the top three barriers, number one, fear, fear of what other people think or fear of failure. Very common fears. We all feel those fears. I look at these as taxes you have to pay to achieve your goals. These aren't going away, right? You're never going to conquer the fear. I speak over a hundred times a year to lots of people. I still get stage fright. I know that this is part and parcel with doing the thing that's important to me. I'm pushing myself. I'm going to feel that discomfort, that fear, but that also is a positive. That means I'm growing. That's an indicator that I'm pushing myself to evolve. So when you think, when you feel this fear, know that part of it is excitement. Fear and excitement, anxiety and excitement, very similar feelings. So when I'm afraid to, or I feel stage fright or I'm nervous about a talk, I think, wow, I must be excited. So I can shift some of that energy into excitement. So I think just the awareness that the fear is not going to go away and that it's a part of you growing, you know, to get to where you are, you didn't coast. It's not like you conquered fear, right? You took risks. You had to put yourself out there. You're like, what are people going to think of this podcast? What if I fail? That stops most people that fear. So first, the awareness that the fear is not going away. You're never going to conquer it. You've got to push through it and that feeling is actually not positive because what I found is that when I put myself in that vulnerable position, right, ultimately something positive is going to come with it. At the very least, I learned something about myself, even a full of failure is a positive because I've learned something about myself. Usually it's a pivot into the direction that I know that I'm supposed to go. And so, so let's look at like both of those fears individually, but I think at first it's just the awareness. Now, I think it's important to look at what are the real fears. And don't look at fears, look at risks. What are the real risks? So are you risking your ego or what other people might think of you or are you risking your financial well-being? Are you risking the well-being of your family? You know, is your livelihood at risk, your mortgage? All of these things are real risks. So I don't want to be so just non-ground in reality, the basic fact that you need to look at what is at risk, but I think that sometimes we inflate the imagined risks. So you can write down, what are the real risks? So now you know, this is what you're risking. And if you feel comfortable putting those at risk and knowing that, okay, you know what, if I fail here, I'm not going to lose my house, my family's going to be okay, my health is going to be okay, then I think that this is something that I can take a crack at. So you sort of look at this fear as, you know, if you're afraid to go after your goal or you're waiting for the right time, unfortunately you failed, right, because you did not achieve your goal. So at least when you're trying to fail, what you learned from that really outweighs any potential hit of your reputation. And I think the other thing that's trying to interesting about the fear of what other people think, because this is something that I struggle with, right, you know, this is something that doesn't go away, but the truth is when it comes to the fear of what other people think, people just aren't thinking about me as much as I think they are, right, they're busy living their life worried about what other people are thinking about them. They're not thinking about me all the time. And so in addition, they're also more supportive. Like when we finally had the courage to talk about what we wanted with our bucket list, the reality is people stepped up and helped. The only way that we crossed things off our list is to help other people. And if we didn't talk about it, we didn't, you know, it's really hard to say what you want and share what you want. Letting go of what other people think is really difficult, but you give them the chance to help you. And if you don't talk about it, no one can help you. And we found that people stepped up in unexpected ways. So that is the fear piece, which is the biggest, which I think is the number one barrier. And then the second two barriers very quickly, there's no deadlines. So we push these personal goals. So we need to create accountability. And that means that we need to write down our goals because then you create a bit of accountability. We need to share our goals because that creates accountability. We need to have accountability partners check in with us. If you want to increase your chances of success by 77%, you have, you send regular updates to your accountability, right? So if you, if you say, I'm going to write my next book this year, I'm like, great, send me a chapter a month, send me, send me what you've been working on every month. If you say on the podcast, ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to announce I'm writing my next book. You're going to write the book because you're going to write the book, yeah, you told everybody right? I was going to be like, how's the book coming? How's the book coming? How's the book coming? It's like crap. I got to write this thing. And so those, those are ways to create accountability. You can, you, you block it out of your calendar, you know, just like you put in your calendar, you have a podcast recording. It's very rare. You're going to miss that, right? The big guest coming in, like you're not, you're protecting that time. You need to have the same vigilance in protecting time for your personal goals, these personal passions. So that means protecting it, putting in your calendar, communicating it with people, you know, setting precedence, you know, if you, if you do a trip with your friends and it's every once a year, you do it on the same weekend, that's great because that's happening. You have a group of friends, you're going on that trip and you do it every year. You keep each other accountable, you know, with a date, your, your family knows it's important to you. That's, that is the type of accountability that you need to drive forward. So the, and the third goal, sorry, the third barrier is, what is it? So no accountability fear, waiting to feel inspired, waiting to feel inspired, yeah. Which I think we all feel, right? Like, pandemic hit, I rushed out on the perfect, grabbed a guitar, bought it, it's sitting in the corner. I'm just waiting for it to feel inspired to pick up and play like it's, the inspiration is never going to hit, but you create your own inspiration through action. And the trick is sometimes we feel like we need to know the path to success. I'm sure you didn't know how the, how you're going to build a successful podcast and brand. I had no clue. I didn't know that if I did it, you know, a thousand times and it would figure itself out eventually. Exactly. So you would learn by doing. And so you don't need to know the full path to success. There's, there's initial small steps. You start, you build your own inspiration through action. So it's literally, you know, throwing a snowball over hill, it's the momentum, it grows. So that's why you want to create very easy steps in the beginning, like writing it down, like talking about it, these things that will start to me. You know, what are the smallest things in the, in the bucket list journal, when you start a list item, you break it down into 48 hour action items. What are the three things you can do in the next 48 hours? Let's create the momentum, you know? And so this, this, you're sort of the architect of your own inspiration through action. And sometimes, like we were talking before, you, you overplan, we love to plan, right? We'll, we'll plan till we die. And then we'll forget that action is the plan, action is the plan. So your, your plan is to learn as you go. And you'll, even if you don't know the second step, just the first step, you'll figure out the second after the first. So in short, you create accountability to, to, to move yourself forward. You create your own inspiration through action. And you identify real fears and imagine fears and understand that you're really the architect of this whole process.