What are you afraid of?

What are you afraid of?

This past weekend I spoke at a Chamber of /Commerce event in South Florida. I had the honor to share the platform with a good friend and magnificent speaker, Lisa Jimenez. She doesn’t speak Spanish, but she has a Spanish last name since she was married to a Mexican American for a few years. She was already well known in the speaking world, so she decided to keep her last name. Even if she gets married again, the new husband will have to listen to that last name for his whole life. Poor guy if he is jealous.

I don’t know in how many countries the woman surrenders her last name, her father’s, to adopt the new last name of the husband. In the United States is fairly common, and although in PR it is a little bit less common, it still happens often.
To tell you the truth, I find it horrible that a woman will scratch the last name of her father, especially if he has been a good father. Think about it. A man comes into the woman’s life and boom, they get married and the father’s last name disappears. Is that fair?
These last few years, lots of women have kept their own last names or have added the husbands name with a hyphen. This is the case with my daughter, she kept Posada but tacked on Rodriguez with a hyphen. Oh, well, life goes on.

Anyway, speaking about Lisa, she spoke about a very interesting subject: Fear.
She started by telling all participants that we all have an internal battle. Everyone has negative and non productive thoughts that invade the subconscious. She asked the audience to ask themselves some questions: What is my internal battle? What limits me?
Why haven’t I been more successful in spite of all that I have going for me?
These are valid questions that we all have to ask ourselves once in a while so as not to fall in the dreaded comfort zone.
She is of the opinion that there are three main fears that limits us:

Fear of failure
Fear of rejection
Fear of success.

She asked another interesting question: What is your relationship with fear? Do you have an empowered or a destructive relationship?
These are not questions that we ask ourselves often.
Whatever the answer to the question, it has been taught to you. You have learned to have that relationship and what was learned, can be unlearned, so it can be changed if you really want to.
The reality of fear is that it is not going away. It will always be there and it is up to you how you deal with it. You may feel afraid but you can act as if you are not afraid. And by doing that, you slowly but surely will diminish your fear and sometimes make it disappear.
The problem is not being afraid of a problem but allowing fear to paralyze you and prevent you to act and we all know that the key to success is not wishing that you are successful but behaving as if you are and doing what you need to do in order to achieve it.

What do you think about when you think about fear? What comes to your mind when you think about fear? Have no money? Feeling embarrassed? Feeling rejected by those you love? Fear of dying? Fear of getting old? Fear of public speaking?

These are only thoughts and if you have the power to choose your thoughts, you have the power to eliminate them. Remember that the thoughts you choose will determine the results you will have in your life, it is as simple as that.

Failure has to be reframed, looked at differently. You have to think about failure as a step in the ladder to success.
If you know that it will take ten no’s to be able to get a prospect to say yes, then each no, theoretically brings you closer to the final yes. If you focus on the goal and you don’t allow anything to distract you, you will feel closer to success with every failure you have. Failing is a learning experience and it has to be viewed as such and also as temporary. The same with success by the way, it is only temporary.

Fear of success, what an interesting concept. The speaker asked all of us to think about three people that in our minds are successful people.
You can even do this exercise right now. Think about three people you think are successful.
Participants thought about Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett and others that coincidentally or not, were very rich people.
Then she asked a very interesting question:
Who thought about yourself as being successful?

Only one person raised her hand. I consider myself fairly successful and I didn’t raise my hand. I did think about my Dad who was a hard working man and very talented but it didn’t even occur to me to think about me.

Success is first created in our own minds so it is important to see yourself as a successful person. In fact, if we really analyze it, we are all already very successful.
During my speech in the afternoon I spoke about Michael Phelps the best athlete in the world and a very successful human being. I then said to the participants that they all started the same way that Michael did, by winning the first race ever. I then showed a spermatozoid beating every single spermatozoid in the race and it had the name Michael Phelps.
Everybody laughed, but it is the truth. Think about it. In all of us, we were the ones that beat the millions of other spermatozoids that were racing towards the egg and we won. We all started with a miraculous win.
Write your goals for 2009 and analyze if your daily behavior is congruent with your goal or objective. If your belief system is not congruent with your goals, your belief system will always win. If you fear that you are not worth it, you don’t deserve it or you will never make it, it doesn’t matter what your goal is, you will not achieve it and many times you will sabotage it, right when you are on the verge of getting what you want. This sounds strange but believe me, it is the truth.
You become what you think about, you get what you believe you should get and your behavior will follow your thoughts. It is as simple as that.
Start retraining your mind by forcing it to eliminate those negative thoughts and substituting them for positive ones.
You practice this often enough and you will see very positive results in a short time.