I sent the following note to my private client today, but it's a message I want to share with you too. Here's what I wrote to my client today;

 

"The fears you have are serious fears. 

 

Fear of never being loved the way you truly desire.
Fear of allowing your Story of Rejection to mess up your life. 
Fear of not succeeding in your business. 
Fear of moving beyond your family story. 
Fear of rejection by the tribe; your family, friends, community. 
Fear of being seen as selfish. 
Fear of having 'them' whisper behind your back, "Who does she think she is." 
Fear of never allowing yourself to be who you came here to be, to do what you came here to do. 
Fear of not fitting in. 
Fear of being criticized and judged. 
Fear of never freeing yourself from the grip of your limiting thoughts and most unworthy self. 
Fear of regret. 
Fear of being left. 
Fear of never feeling good enough. 
Fear of never having what you want most. 
Fear of failure. 

Fear of struggling forever. 
Fear of never being able to set yourself free. 

 

These are serious fears. They are indeed very real. But they are not the real fear.

 

The real fear is that you will succeed.

 

The following excerpt is from Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art. I wish I had written it myself. It is so poetic and perfect and powerful that I want to share it with you untouched by me. This is what he says about our greatest fear. 

 

"The Mother of all Fears, that's so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don't believe it, is the fear that we will succeed.

 

That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess.

 

That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.

 

This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years. 

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our glad, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous. 

 

We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.

 

Of course this is exactly what happens. But here's the trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, true friends. And we're better and truer to them."

 

***

 

You are here because you have a job to do, a vision to realize, a story to tell, a Real Self to become, a meaningful life to lead. 

 

But the only way to do the work of being You, so that you may know your most fulfilling and rich life, is to show up inside every moment as your most worthy self. Your worthy self knows that you are not really afraid of all those things you've been making yourself believe, you're afraid of what will happen if you actually succeed.

You're afraid of giving up the old story, of turing your back on who you've always been, of belonging somewhere you've always known, of giving up something that feels comforting and safe. Meanwhile, you have a nagging sense that these fears are blocking you from who you really want to be. 

The worthiness principle I teach my private clients is this:

 

You don't have to give up the Story of 'not good enough', but you do have to hold it a different way.  The key to living your richest, most rewarding life is not about giving up the whole story, it's about no longer making decisions from this unworthy, 'not good enough' place.