If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that success is never guaranteed. You have to be prepared for anything and everything because the unknown is always lurking around the corner. And as a leader, you know that you can’t let fear hold you back. You have to be brave enough to embrace the unknown and seize every opportunity that comes your way. So don’t be afraid to take risks and go after your dreams. The only way to achieve real success is to put yourself out there and dare to dream big!
For years, I was terrified of the unknown. I would avoid anything that made me feel uncomfortable or scared. I would stick to what was safe and familiar, never branching out into new territory. But over time, I’ve realized that this fear of the unknown is what’s holding me back from achieving my goals and reaching my full potential. So I’ve decided to embrace the unknown, and here are three tips on how you can do the same.
Take Chances, and Don’t be Afraid of Failure
Have you ever signed up for a course that you knew would help you but halfway through it and right around when it starts to get painful, you regret your decision? You start to wonder what on earth you were thinking and why you couldn’t just have left well enough alone and been happy with the way things were. If so, then you might find yourself able to relate to what I discovered on my journey into the unknown.
I’ve always had this lifelong pursuit of self-awareness and growth, so naturally, when the opportunity arose, I signed up for some training to get a look at some of the things that were holding me back in life, both personally and professionally. On the first day, I showed up super excited! WOOHOO! Finally, I was going to get an up-close seat to how I did life and boy, was I ready to attack this thing. I wanted change. .Let’s do it!
Yet….by week two, I started noticing that it had me in a real funk.
Be Open to Change and New Ideas
The training was intended to peel back the layers and expose many of my default patterns.
OOH yay! Is that really what I wanted it to do? Hmmmm. I guess I didn’t expect to come to terms with the fact that these defaults had been lifelong friends of mine. When it appeared that it was time to move on without them, I wasn’t so sure about the training opportunity anymore. I found myself completely in a place of fear and despair.
So I did my thing. I tried to analyze it and discovered that analyzing was a default that had no place in this new realm of understanding. Ouch, Now what?
I was receiving new data that I knew was necessary in order for me to obtain a breakthrough, and yet I found myself sitting in so much resistance around it. The same question kept arising. What if my defaults weren’t so bad after all?
I had signed up for this new learning because I knew that I needed it and I desperately wanted things to go differently in my life so why was I so triggered by it? Why did it feel so painfully personal?
I felt overwhelmingly lost and confused. It looked really scary out there in this place where I couldn’t do what I normally did to survive.
Everything here was unknown, and as I tried to find my way through it, I discovered that I kept returning to the old patterns. The old ways of being that did life primarily from my head and had no idea what it felt like to be in tune with my body as well. That realization scared the heck out of me.
My usual mode of operation up until then had been to analyze the data and to make meaning out of it. Then I would process and access what I thought I should do with this new information, and yet I’ve learned there just might be a better way to do life, and I was feeling extremely off kilter.
All of a sudden, I had a surreal moment with a familiar quote. I had heard the Albert Einstein phrase: “You can’t fix a problem with the same thinking that you created it with.”
Now I was hearing it with new ears and with my heart in addition to my head.
If I was truly going to change my life, I had to learn something completely new and unknown. I had to start showing up present to what I was feeling in my body and start staying with what is happening right now instead of escaping it by wishing it were different.
Be Persistent and Never Give Up
Oftentimes there is this war waging within me between who I always was and who I long to be.
I found myself standing in the front lines of this war again, and in my moment of learning how to be with this version of me that I longed to be, I went to grab my usual armor and sword only to discover that they didn’t look so powerful anymore. They were no longer the tools needed here in this new place of being with myself. Now what?! It was time to retreat. Pull back but don’t analyze.The plan of action was to simply sit with it. Sit with the discomfort and unfamiliar.
Despair was taking root. I felt that dark spiral of depression trying to pull me in. It was alluring, oddly familiar, and almost comforting. I knew this place. I’ve been there before, and my smaller self knew that I could maintain control and feel relatively safe if I choose to stay there awhile.
My default kicked in again. Damn, this thing is persistent. I thought about where I had felt those very same feels before. Suddenly, I noticed more awareness. Now that I have learned this thing, it won’t let me go back to complacency anymore. I realized that the meaning that I was giving to being in the unknown was saturated with old truths. I recognized my default patterns at work there again. I associated the unknown with despair and grief. It was all I had known in my relationship with the unfamiliar.
In this moment, it was super important that I reminded myself; that was then and this is now.
I asked myself a new question. What else might be possible here in this relationship with the unknown? Suddenly I felt hope and relief rush inward, followed by this moment of choice. I knew that at that moment, I could choose to ignore it, or I could choose to simply embrace the unknown and sit with it without adding any meaning to it or associating it with old stories of what was.
There’s a lot of learning and unlearning to do in life.
Dancing in between what is true and what is not true. I’m sorta clumsy on my feet, but I’m determined to stay with the unknown and let it speak to me, and I challenge you to consider the same.
I will continue learning to replace my old truths and default patterns with new truths and patterns that are more in the moment and in my body instead of being primarily stonewalled by the thoughts in my head.
The world is full of unknowns. Each day, we face new challenges and uncertainties, but the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who learn to embrace the unknown. They see it as an opportunity to grow and learn rather than something to be afraid of. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to learn how to embrace the unknown too.
If you recognize life calling you out into the unknown, I’d like to take the journey with you.
I would be glad to shine the light.
Let’s do this beautiful work together. Invest in your self-awareness, change the default patterns and start living life on new terms.
Make that choice by clicking here.