# 29 - How to Get Over the Fear of Self-Promotion

Episode 29

[00:00:00] : Good morning. Once again, it's Rick Lewis here with The Follow Through Formula Podcast. This is Episode Twenty-Nine. What I want to talk about today is the fear and anxiety that many of us experience in relationship to self-promotion.

I grew up in a household with a professor who is a very good teacher and who, for probably most of his life, stoicism would be a fairly accurate label to put on his way of thinking. He was very logically driven, very much putting emotion and feeling off to the side as something to be considered when and if it makes sense to consider involving feeling in the equation of a decision or a conversation or an experience. I was given the value system of using logic over emotion or feeling; taking your emotion, your anger, your passion and putting it at a distance and letting it be over there and only considering picking it up if it fits in with your critical thinking plans.

In fact, my father is eighty-five years old, and he is currently teaching a course in critical thinking. The rub is that in the process of adopting this critical thinking perspective and value system, the ability to allow and tap into the emotional or physiological component of being enlivened by an activity or a vision is something that I was trained to have great caution about. Of course, I also gained some of my father's refined and advanced ability to think critically that has served me in my life in ways that I value and appreciate.

We sat in front of the television and he trained me to look at TV ads and commercials from a critical thinking perspective, to look at how they're using this wording and this language and that imagery to try to get you to buy their product or service. I was trained to be a very critical consumer and very watchful of how I was being manipulated by advertising. It became a consistent theme, not wanting to be manipulated into doing something by others, whether it was a company, a product, a service, or an individual. Even in our home in daily interactions, it was very much a theme to be very clear with each other about what it is we wanted and needed, but not to use emotional manipulation as a tactic. This is all very, very worthy and useful training that I'm super grateful to have received in my life. It has served me very well.

On the other hand, promoting and communicating are essential components of human relationship—expressing and communicating things that we would like others to know about or take part in or also derive value from. This relates to the realm of promotion and marketing and sales. If I want you to experience the benefit of something wonderful that I've experienced, I have to communicate that somehow. Today, many companies are relying heavily upon using social media where people talk about products and services that are doing good things for them.  

We're in a realm where the natural, organic, laudable capacity to communicate and express yourself authentically as a human being has now become part and parcel of what drives commerce and enterprise.

On social media we are talking to others about experiences we’ve had. It could be something personal that we did. We could talk about how we had training to run a marathon and what this did for our lives to get in shape this way. And in the same conversation, we might talk about an experience we had with a particular website that helped us transcribe meeting notes. Our conversations go back and forth between talking about experiences with products and services and our own inner lives and our relationships.

In the middle of all this we might have the reasonable fear that when we talk about something that we're trying to sell, people are going to be critical of us, or they're going to remove themselves from our company (“unfriend” us) because we're talking about something that we find great value in. So we might steer away from that. But that makes it difficult for us to use those platforms to make a living doing something we love.

Many people I have coached are in that situation. While they may feel comfortable promoting something from their position inside an organization, they would have a much more difficult time feeling free to express that if they were to start a small business, or promote a service about something they know, or that they love. There is a barrier to standing up and saying, “Here's something I'm really good at. I'm an incredible copywriter and I want to sell you on my services.” We run into this obstacle where we fear somebody pointing at us and saying, “Hey, you're just trying to make a buck, and this is pretty ego centered now that you're doing this whole business that's all about you and your talents and your skills.”

This is a big stumbling block that many people experience when it comes to actually moving toward a form of livelihood that involves doing something they really love or are very passionate about, which might be oriented to a core skill or capacity that they have. I'm squarely in this category right now. I've spent my life incrementally getting over and getting past this fear.

I've personally spent decades getting beyond this fear of promoting myself, and it's been very difficult for me and in many cases I haven't done any promotion. I was a street performer for ten years, never did any kind of promotion whatsoever, and it was a perfect job for me because I didn't have to do that. All I had to do was show up in the middle of a public place and offer what I had to offer and have people pay me after the fact, after I had delivered the product and they enjoyed it. That was perfect for me. Absolutely no need to confront my fear of promoting myself. And then I turned into a corporate entertainer and I had to start learning how to promote myself. I learned how to create websites, but even then, I would not send out an email or make a phone call saying, “Hey, I have this service and I'm good at this. Would you like me to do this for you?”

The next step after that was becoming a corporate speaker. I started to take the ideas and the thought leadership that was naturally occurring for me in my own growth pursuits and integrate those into my performance career, expanding from entertainment to speaking. Over the years, in order to get work as a corporate speaker, I had to get over more and more of my fears and my hesitations about marketing myself. I had to make cold calls and send out emails and advertise a little bit. Every one of these steps has been fraught with a tremendous amount of fear, because I'm afraid of receiving the feedback that I'm not getting hired, that people aren't signing on or don't want to pay what I believe I'm worth. This is something I have had to struggle with each time I have upscaled in my work life, and now I am once again in that position. All my speaking business was canceled for this year. A solid speaking calendar, a really good, paying speaking career that's had fabulous momentum for me in the last decade came to a screeching halt.

So, I'm turning to e-commerce, online courses, and I have a tremendous amount of content to offer. The content is not the problem or the issue. It’s how do I market it? What problem am I solving? I have put myself in front of people and say, “Hey, everybody, this is what I've got! Come get it if you want it!” It requires a kind of inner work to be able to put out and express a core, authentic passion for something one loves to do, a way one loves to serve, a manner in which one adores contributing. We have to speak and communicate from that place in order to let other people know about what we're doing.  

It's going to require that we come up against our conditioning from the past, where we were told, “Who do you think you are? Don't be so loud. You’re getting too big for your britches.”  

These are the kinds of phrases that are pulled out for kids when they're being big and passionate and alive. Those start to replay themselves unconsciously in our minds when we start to allow that energy of joy, passion, excitement about something to enter into our body. It's a very vulnerable position to be in, because when you bring that enlivened quality into your body, then it's possible that somebody is going to get triggered by that and look at you and say, “Hey, who do you think you are? Stop being so self-centered. Stop trying to be so big.”

This is what I'm in the middle of once again. I want to speak about it because I think there are many people in this position where you have something that you passionately want to offer, and at the same time you are warring with another unconscious part that is sending you stop signals. “Wait, don't go there. Danger. This is emotionally dangerous. This is socially dangerous for you to stand up and you'll become a target if you start speaking this way.”

 This podcast has been huge, to commit to putting out something daily around my passion for people living their purpose and acting on it consistently. Just committing to that and coming into my shower stall every single day to talk about it has been rife with fear and insecurity about putting it out, but it has also been a huge opening for me. As I'm speaking into this joy, this passion, I am discovering more content, more opportunities, more possibilities for myself in a new career than I ever dreamed of. I have so many things over the course of a day now, directions I want to go in, things I want to develop. It's bringing energy into my life. It's lighting me up. It's lighting my family up. My son has been lit up with me in the last couple of weeks, and I think he is responding to seeing how happy and joyous I am with what I'm doing on a daily basis. My willingness to do what I love unreservedly with passion and joy is affecting my entire family in a very positive way.

My friend John Souza, who I spoke with in that previous episode about the five types of fear, told me something in that podcast that I didn't really know, which is that in the last fifteen years his occupation as a certified family and marriage therapist has been something he's doing on top of a previous passion, which is to be a musician. Music is a huge part of who he is. It's a huge part of his inner life. And yet he has turned more to this professional capacity as a therapist in the last fifteen years, and he's a damn good one. He knows his stuff inside and out. He's the president of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. If you go and look him up on LinkedIn, he's got more credentials and experience than you could list or remember, it's a list is long as my arm. He's really good at this, but the thing that brings him the most joy and lights him up is music.

He told me in the podcast that because of our conversations and this friendship that he and I formed a few years ago, he is picking up the ball on his music career, and he's building it on the side as he continues to be a therapist, and it's bringing a huge amount of joy into his life. What he told me is he is completely reconnected to his purpose, and he thanked me for this.

Now I didn't do that intentionally. I wasn't trying to sell him on switching careers. But in the course of getting to know him and hearing about his love of music, I couldn't stop myself from encouraging him to move toward that activity morein his life.

I love to see people light up this way. I love to see people do what they love, to see  someone adopt a different track in their life and make a pretty significant life change that is positive and fulfilling. I have several other friends that this has naturally occurred with as well, because it's a conversation that I am meant to have with people. I don't know why. I don't know why I'm not interested in semi-trucks and what kind of tires work best (I know there's somebody out there who has that passion), or in why cumulus clouds form the way they do in the sky and what that means for weather patterns. I know there must be people out there for whom that is their passion. Pick anything, any subject matter, and you can find someone who just gets lit up by putting their attention on that thing and knowing about it and providing information or service to others in relationship to that topic.

The idea that I can't get out of my mind is that if even just .01% of the whole population of the world were to shift to do what they love more consistently, I believe the impact it would have would be massive, along the lines of the Butterfly Effect, where one little thing that happens anywhere in the world affects the whole world. When people do things that they love, they affect the whole field that they exist within.

When you see someone who is aligned with themselves, when their activity, their speech, and their behavior is aligned with who they really are, it brings forward an energy that affects everybody around them.

That's why people who love what they do become successful at it. One, because if you want to be successful at anything, you've got to spend a lot of time doing it. It takes a lot of time to be successful at anything. If you love something, your chances of spending a lot of time doing it increase dramatically. And second, when you are talking to someone about the value of something, if you actually believe in it and it's coming from the core of something that you enjoy and that you yourself pursue, it's going to be received in a whole different way than if you're a sales-person who's selling something that you just think other people might buy.

 It would be the difference between a sales clerk in a stereo store talking to someone who wants to buy a stereo saying, “Well, these speakers are really good because they're made out of this kind of resin fiber and they vibrate at a frequency of X number of kilohertz,” and another sales clerk in a stereo store on the other side of town who's saying, “Oh my God, you've got to hear these speakers! These are the ones I have in my house and I play Beethoven's Fifth on these speakers and I want you to hear the difference between this classical music when it's played on this speaker and that speaker. It's a whole different life experience because you can hear the such-and-such in the background at…” You get my idea here.

When we are living inside of the things that we want to share with others, the way we are interacting with them is a completely different thing from “selling” to people.

So, what do we do when we’re initially afraid of promoting or selling who we really are? If this describes you, I'd like you to consider this at the beginning, in the early stages of promoting or selling yourself as, say, an artist. Maybe you make art. Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you really know about fitness, and you love coaching people into better health. Maybe you just know about dog training and you can train dogs like nobody's business and you can actually teach that to other people. Whatever it is you're good at when it comes to putting yourself out there.

I'm thinking of my brother right now. My brother is this extraordinary wildlife photographer, and he suffers from the same familial training that I got growing up. He just wants absolutely no part of selling his photos. He does not want to promote himself in any way, shape or form in terms of what he can do, but his photos are beautiful, extraordinary photos. When I talked to him about it, he says, “Well, so many people can do that. So many people do great wildlife photography.” This is the manner in which so many people are talking themselves out of the possibility of having a life focus that they could be deriving not only pleasure, enjoyment, and energy from, but also actual income.

People could be making a living doing things they love in many cases. Granted, not in all cases. In some instances, okay, you're not going to make a living at it. Maybe you try and it doesn't work. But it's still going to bring a huge degree of profit into your life because there are other forms of profit other than just finances. There's emotional profit. There's health profit. There's relational profit. All these forms of capital are things we also need is human beings. And doing what we love and what brings us joy draws that kind of profit into our lives, and we need it. For many of us, our jobs are not bringing in these other forms off profit that we need to thrive in our lives.

When you're first beginning in the early stages of promoting your expertise or your skill or your passion, you can pretty much predict that you're going to feel tentative and afraid about putting yourself out there. If you go halfway and you start to kind of do it and kind of promote yourself, it's possible you're going to get knocked off your horse. Maybe you're not going to get business or you're not going to get traction or you're not or you're not going to get interest from other people. And if that happens, if that occurs, you're going to crawl back into your shell, and it's going to seem like proof that when you put yourself out there, it doesn't work. It's painful.

On the other hand, when you go all in and buy all in, when you commit to contributing from your passion, regardless of what happens, regardless of whether you make a living at it or make any money at it, regardless of the initial response, then we can say with almost certainty that whatever you love to do and be an expert in or support others with, there are people out there who are looking for that. And because of the Internet, you can find those people—they exist in the world. There are enough of them for you to have a joyous experience of connecting with at least a moderate number, if not a huge number of people who need exactly what you have to provide by learning about and using online tools. Ideally, you're using those online tools to connect with people person to person, because face to face interactions are so fulfilling and meaningful. But right now, especially in the period of Covid-19 that we're dealing with, this is going to have to happen online. You're going to have to figure out how to use these tools for connection and to deliver contribution and value, and it's possible to do. There are so many ways to do that now. I'm speaking from my own experience because this is what's happening for me.

Those fears of being grandiose or too big for your britches are going to gradually get pushed to the side by your connection to the thing that you want to champion.

For example, you might love language and the precision of language, and you might discover you have a skill in writing the kind of online copy that allows someone who has something of value to connect with a consumer who can get the value of that product or service. Let's say that's what you love and you hang out a shingle and say, “Hi, my name is Carl Copywriter and I can help you do this.” If you go all in, your fears of putting your own personality on a brand and selling that are going to get eclipsed and replaced by the fact that you are actually putting your attention on this thing that you love. You will start getting the interest of business owners who need really great copy and they're going to come to you. Once they reach you your conversations are not going to be about you and how great you are. They’re going to be about copyrighting. They will say, “Well, I have this product. I need to reach consumers in the home alarm market. Here's what our alarm does that’s special and unique and we love that it does this. We want to reach people.” And then you will start talking about how to write copy that will help them do that. You're suddenly in a world where the thing you love and the expertise that you have is going to take over. And that thing is going to become what predominates in your attention and the attention of those who can use your product or service or expertise.

If you go all in, there's going to be a short period of time where you have this awkward, uncomfortable sense of “Oh my God, I'm putting myself out there and this looks totally ego centered and who am I to do this?” That won’t last long. Emotional and social obstacles get taken care of when we just commit to engaging in an environment where we're passionate about the topic, the skill, the product, the need for a solution for other people. When you figure out a problem that you can solve for other people that you love to solve for them, your world will change. Your whole life will change because you are now involved in a dynamic of human reciprocity. Helping others with a real problem they have using real authentic interest and capacity that you have. When you get that loop going between you and other people, there's no stopping it. There's nobody you need permission from to create that reciprocal feeding loop between you and other human beings. The only permission that you have to get is permission from yourself to release your fears about what other people are going to say in relationship to you taking up this purpose. 

Give yourself permission to start pursuing it and to start experiencing the sheer joy of connecting with other human beings in this manner.

That's what's coming up today, and I want that for you. I don't even know who I'm talking to, but I know it's not dogs. It's not cats who are listening to my podcast. It's not robots. I know that human beings are listening to the sound of my voice right now. And because you are one of those human beings, I want this dynamic to be active in your life if it's not already. And if it already is to a certain extent but it could be to a greater extent, I want that for you.

I want to help you when you have that problem of shying away, backing away, hiding from what matters most to you and you're going about your days wondering, “Why is my energy low? Why is my health not good? Why are my finances struggling? Why are my relationships flat?”

Bring joy into your life, whether you do it as a living or do it as a hobby, by engaging in the activities that are aligned with your essence, with who you really are.

If you don't know what activities do that for you or what your purpose is, I have lots of stuff I'm now creating and designing to help with that as well. The Follow Through Formula Masterclass is an episode of this podcast that lays out in detail the six obstacles to consistently pursuing what matters most to you.

That masterclass as an episode does two things: It shows you how you can overcome these obstacles on your own, and it tells you how my Follow Through Formula course can assist you in that. I'm happy either way. Of course, I would love to have you in the course, because then I actually get paid to do what I'm describing here, and you get an even better result and everybody is happy. But you don't have to do that. In the show notes of that episode, you can download The Follow Through Formula Roadmap, which details what's in the master class.

The next episode I want to send you to is called the $10,000 Purpose Question. The $10,000 purpose question is a guided audio adventure. It's a four-step question process that will give you an immediate focus for your energy and your attention right now. Go listen to that if you're saying to yourself, “Well, I don't know what my purpose is.” The $10,000 Purpose Question will help you find a purpose to start with.

The important thing to know about a purpose is that it doesn't have to be permanent. All you need is a way to get started, to get a little bit of traction with something that's more in the direction of your purpose.

As soon as you start taking action in that direction, you're going to discover and incrementally be able to refine deeper layers of core purpose for yourself.

So those are on tap for the asking. Just go get those episodes and move forward with what I'm describing. Nothing stopping you. Nothing can stop you from doing this. And you can know that you've got at least one person out here who is 400% behind you doing this. I am cheering you on. I am behind you to do this work. This has been Episode 29 of The Follow Through Formula Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Rick Lewis and I'll be back tomorrow. Game on!