FEAR IS THE KEY TO YOU NOT STARTING

I asked a some of my friends on the Internet to help me with some tips about how they overcame their writing fears, and they really came through for me. I have nearly an hour of tips, strategies and ideas here which I will publish here. 

I will let my experts kick this discussion off off. I do have a few more tips of my own I want to include later and I’m going read a few tips from people who for a couple of reasons didn't want to read their own. They either have a heavy accent or one of them came in on e-mail that I just had to include because it was so awesome.

Linda Formichelli:
She writes:"Hi everybody. This is Linda Formichelli with the Renegade Writer here to share my best fear-busting tip with you. I know most writers especially new writers are scared. They’re afraid of failure, afraid of success, afraid of marketing themselves, afraid to pick up the phone. 

I mean you name it they’re afraid of it and it’s totally understandable. When you become a writer you're putting yourself out there and you're putting your writing out there for everybody to see and potentially criticize, and that’s hard. I mentor writers on the phone and I used to advertise that I could help writers get past their fears. Then we would spend a half hour on the phone while the writer tried to figure out why she was afraid, and then we would figure out ways to beat down that particular fear.

a way to beat your fears, you beat your fears by starting to write. The more you write the less afraid you’ll be. When I was starting out over 16 years ago, I was totally freaked out by interviews. I’m not a phone person. I’m not a good speaker and that’s why I became a writer, but I forced myself to do these interviews because I really, really wanted to make it as a freelance writer and I didn't want to have to go back to the nine to five. 

And what happened was that slowly the more interviews I did the less afraid I became. And because I gained confidence in my abilities I saw I can do this. It’s working out, and I saw that no harm would come out of interviewing people. Everybody was nice. I never had a problem, and eventually I lost almost all my fear.

 Peter Bowerman:
Peter writes:"Hi everybody. This is Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Writer and a commercial freelancer since 1993. And this is my fear-busting tip. In the Well-Fed Writer I talk about cold calling and I share an idea that’s helped a lot of people, and I’ll explain it as I do when I do workshops. 

I ask if you're starting a cold calling campaign should you focus on action or results, this is taking the action or the outcome of those actions, the result? And some will say results but someone will say, eventually, will say action. And I say that’s the right answer. 

Why? Because you can control actions but you can’t control results. I say this is why cold calling freaks out so many people because they’re so worried about how they’re going to do and how it’s going to turn out instead of just taking the action and not worrying about the outcome, which you actually have little control over. 

You have no control over whether someone is a prospect for writing services or whether they already have a writer or two or 10 that they use, or if they’re even having a bad day, but you have complete control over the actions that you take. I talk about two writers who start out in the morning at 9:00. One with a goal of making 50 phone calls. 

The other with a goal of getting two new writing jobs or three hot leads. Okay. Well, at the end of the day who will have had a more stressful day? I think it’s clear that the one who had hot leads and jobs as their goal has got a much more stressful day.

The guy makes 50 calls, he just makes his 50 calls and once he’s done, he’s done and you forget about it. And there’s the clincher. Assuming that you get the basics in place, a decent script, and yes you should have a script when you're making cold calling, and a good phone voice. Then if you take enough action the results will come. That’s the law of averages. It’s a given."

Alexis Grant:
He writes: "Hi, Andre'. This is Alexis Grant from AlexisGrant.com and the WriteLife.com. And my best fear-busting tip is to break down your fear into little bitty pieces, and you can do this in two ways. You can actually look at kind of what you're afraid of and break that down, and think about whether the pieces of that fear are actually realistic or whether you're kind of blowing it up in your mind, or you can also break it down into action steps. 

So whenever I’m feeling scared about something I like to break it down into actionable tasks. Little pieces of tasks that I can actually achieve. Things that don’t feel super daunting. So when I break down this fear into little pieces it actually a lot of times doesn't look all that scary at all. You know, I say, ‘Oh, I can do this piece and I can do that piece.’ And if there are any gaps I figure out how to fill them, but the entire task overall seems a lot less daunting when I break it down. And I’ll give a quick example. 

This is an example that shows that the anxiety that you feel when you're first starting your own business while it might get a little bit better over time it often doesn't completely go away. And even those of who have been running our own businesses for a few years still get anxiety especially over money, and I think money is a big fear that a lot of people have. 

Fear of not having enough money. So whether you are starting your own business, whether you're working as a freelancer, often we just worry that the money is not going to be there to support us. And so recently I had this fear about money. And I've been in business for myself now for three years, three and a half years actually. 

Two years full time because I started out as a side gig. And still I worry that we’re going to lose one of our big clients. I run a content marketing business and I have a team of about 10 people who help me service our clients. And so it’s not a small business at this point. It’s really grown, and I still worry that we’re going to lose one of the clients that give us a lot of money each month. And so I use this fear-busting tip for myself recently and my coach helped me out, my business coach. 

We looked at this fear and we said, ‘Okay. How can we break it down?’ The truth is realistically you're probably not going to lose one of those big clients, but even if you do what would happen next? You’d try to get a new client to replace that revenue or you’d create a new product, or launch a new website to replace that revenue. And of all of those things that I could do are very real opportunities for me. 

So, the truth is that if we lost a client we could fairly easily replace that revenue within 30 Fearbuster Page 4 days or so. This is what my coach and I figured out when we actually broke it down. And that made me feel a lot better. So whenever I have that same anxiety, whenever it pops up and I start to worry about making enough money to cover our expenses I remind myself to really break that down and think about what are the pieces of the puzzle that I can really rely on. 

What are the pieces of the puzzle that are true and realistic and things that I should actually worry about versus pieces that maybe I’ve blown up a little bit in my mind. And when I really take it down to those little pieces they actually don’t exist that much anymore. So that’s my fear-busting tip and I hope it’s helpful to you all. Thanks."