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One of my favorite quotes about fear comes from Sven Goran Eriksson, “The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” So often, we get in our own way of achieving what we say we want to achieve. Fear may be paralyzing and will hold you back from accomplishing your goals. Fear breeds hypocrisy; until you fully face your fear and release it, you will not achieve the success you dream of. Fear is a belief system and a voice that speaks to us on a daily basis, even when we’re not consciously aware of it. The interesting thing about fears is that most of them are learned and irrationally based.

Interestingly, some of the clients I work with allow their fear of repercussions such as being fired, not being taken seriously, not being seen as a team player, and being denied opportunities for plum assignments or promotions to stop them from asking for what they need to be productive and performing at their highest levels. I’ve learned both personally and through working as a leadership and personal coach that if you don’t ask for what you want/need, you’re most certainly not going to get it. If you express your request, you improve the chances of getting a “yes” or negotiating more closely for something that will work for all parties involved.

Here are some practical steps to help you fight throughyour fears. With any luck, by facing your fears, you may be able to get some of them to disappear all together!

Step 1 – Identify your fear(s)

In order to fight your fear, you need to know what it is. The better you’re able to understand where it’s coming from, the better your chances at fighting your fear. Whether you’re afraid of failure or success, rejection or repercussion, embarrassment or mistakes, or something else, be aware of your fears. Know what’s at the root cause of what you fear. (Read the story about my client Petra to learn how she went through the process of identifying and addressing her fears).

Step 2 – Face the fear

Recognize your fear and confront it head-on. Identify the payoff of your inaction and not pursuing your goals steadfastly. Also, identify the hardships, obstacles, roadblocks and other excuses in your life. Be aware that people around you may want to keep you where they’re comfortable; they may be afraid for you or for themselves. In addition, hear what you keep telling yourself you need to have or do before you can pursue your goal. Notice where the fear shows up physically in your body—do you get a headache, stiff back, anxiety, memory issues??

After looking at the negative consequences of your fear in each area of life, identify the beliefs that lead to this fear. Once you identify the beliefs for each area, refute them if they are irrational, and replace them with more rational beliefs. For example, if your beliefs are negative self-talk scripts, replace them with positive self-affirming scripts like “I deserve this”; “I can do this”; “I am good enough, smart enough, talented enough…”. Identify your underlying beliefs about what you’re fearing—do you feel you deserve it; do you feel you’re capable, etc.?

Step 3 – Visualize a positive outcome

Define your goal and envision yourself achieving it. Notice what you have in place to support you; who is there with you; where you are. Prepare yourself. Avoid self-sabotaging behaviors. The more you prepare, the more your fears may subside.

Step 4 – Do it anyway

Although you may have backed away from your goals previously, break it down into actionable steps and secure the resources, confidence, and support you need to step forward and through it. Check in to be sure that your goal is actually your own so that it’s not just a matte of rebellion against what someone else wants for you. The best way to reduce your fear in any area is to take action. Action builds confidence, experience and knowledge. Start off with small steps and build up your confidence until the fear is more manageable. Go boldly into taking decisive action. Persist by trying different strategies or approaches to achieving your desired outcome.

Step 5 – Assess without obsessing your results

Fear is your body’s warning siren, and it can go off even when it does not need to sound! Evaluate your fears. Positive thinking alone without taking necessary precautions to minimize risks is not enough. Figure out the messages and warnings your fear is sending to you.

Evaluate your effectiveness in facing your fears and working through them. Recognize where you are and are not sabotaging your relationships, career or life goals. Figure out why you’re sabotaging your goals by talking to people you trust, writing in your journal, and being gently honest with yourself. Just accept your reasons and you’re likely to get a sense of freedom. Make a contingency plan to hedge your risks. Even if your first option fails or gets rejected, you can maintain the status quo with a solid backup plan. If what you’re doing isn’t working, re-evaluate and do something different or do things differently!

Step 6 – Continue steady progress toward facing your fears and fighting through them

“It’s better to tried and failed than not to have tried at all” (apparently a misquote from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem about love In Memoriam:27, 1850.) . You gain valuable experience, education, contacts, and self-confidence by working towards your goals and fighting through the fears that can sabotage your success and happiness. Recognize that it’s okay to be scared. Many people are afraid of asking, trying, working hard, pushing themselves, sharing their goals and it really is no big deal, unless you let it get in your way. ReadFeel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. If you don’t have time to find the book, then just make it your motto. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway will help you overcome the fears you experience.

Setting and achieving realistic and attainable goals can be scary because it involves change and at least some degree of uncertainty. Facing and fighting your fears may be a lot of work. It takes time, patience, persistence and determination. If you have a goal, but are afraid to commit, force yourself into action by setting deadlines and gaining the support you need to move forward. Sometimes it's easier to do this type of work with someone else, so feel free to ask for help from a trusted friend or a helping professional like a therapist or professionally trained coach.

When your cup runs over and your plate is full, the notion of savoring the flavor may be hard to grasp!  However, rather than rushing to complete every task on your to-do list, so that you can then check them off as done and move on to the next item, enjoy the learning, the process, and simply the full flavor of that incredible sense of accomplishment as you acknowledge completion of tasks on your to-do list. Partake in meaningful activities so that you can gain the fullest level of enjoyment from the time and energy you commit.

Fears and limiting beliefs play a big role in our ability to unplug from work.  Many of us fear being replaced if we take time off. If we don't respond immediately to each IM, text or phone call could we really lose our job? Could we be taken less seriously when it's time for raises, promotions, or plum assignments?

Possibly!  However, the bigger block from unplugging is likely to be YOU!

Last year as we spent a week in beautiful Turks & Caicos, there were a number of people who were poolside with their laptop, PDA, or smart phone and others who locked themselves away in their room to handle business. Sadly, some of these people had families with them who were vying for their time and attention and losing big time. The well deserved and needed break from the day-to-day responsibilities was instead being driven by a need to stay connected, to feel important and to be needed. Without establishing clear boundaries, technology makes it easy to stay in touch with anyone, anywhere. On the flip-side, the convenience of readily accessible technology can also make it difficult to get connected to the people you're closest to---your friends and family; it can interfere with self-care, renewal and rejuvenation.  With stress levels at a high, it's more important today to rest and relax because we are truly less effective when we don't take care of ourselves.

The reality is that in most cases, you don't have to be available 24/7.

Here are some keys to help you unplug either at the end of the day or while on a vacation:

• Set realistic expectations and appropriate boundaries.
• Communicate when you'll be out of the office.
• Prepare your co-workers to handle most things while you're away.
• Set-up out-of-office messages on your phone and in your email. Be sure to provide back-up contacts for urgent needs.
• Define true emergencies and inform co-workers not to call unless one of those emergencies arise.
• Establish a time frame each day (at the beginning or end of the day) or specific times every couple of days that you'll be available for phone calls or email check-in.
• Create a rule in your email program, if possible, for important email to forward to a specified folder.

Unplugging begins with your mindset and willingness. The tactics are less complicated than getting around your own fears and beliefs. There's too much on your plate but there doesn't have to continue to be an over-flowing plate while you're away from the office!

While it varies in intensity, almost everyone I know feels some degree of guilt at one moment or another. I frequently hear clients express feelings of guilt—especially the professional career women who have young children. Although the men I work with may have similar feelings of guilt and may experience similar circumstances, these feelings are usually expressed differently. For example, Bill expressed anger and frustration at his boss’s scheduling of late day meetings that prevented him from going to his son’s baseball games. Andrew was mad because he couldn’t spend time with his very ill mother due to work and family demands.

Guilt is something that naturally transcends the entire human race because we all have a conscience. We've all probably done things that we later regret. Realize that by itself guilt is neither good nor bad. Guilt is simply a condition. However, it is often masked as a feeling. The danger of using guilt as an emotion is that it masks deeper emotions and doesn’t identify the real problem. Guilt is most frequently associated with remorse, shame or fault. Guilt may also be associated with feelings of responsibility that weren’t handled appropriately.

Guilt is one of the greatest wastes of emotional energy because it may cause you to become immobilized, debilitated or pre-occupied. It may prevent you from taking concrete actions to resolve the negative feelings. Guilt can be destructive and paralyzing. Feelings of guilt can consume you and negatively impact your life and your relationships with others. This is why it is essential that you learn how to get rid of guilt. When you don’t allow logical thinking to supersede and reject the guilt, you may keep beating yourself up for something you did (or didn’t do).

Guilt, on the other hand, may be productive if it causes you to move forward (e.g., contemplating other options or comparing choices) and gets you away from destructive behavior or thoughts. As a result of productive guilt, you may forgive yourself or others, confess, make better choices that are aligned with your values and priorities, and consciously plan activities that allow you to use your time well.

Here’s an exercise that’s helped clients move away from non-productive guilt:

1. Recognize your guilt by taking a close look at why you feel guilty or what you’re feeling guilty about as soon as possible when you start experiencing signs of guilt. Honestly identify what’s causing you guilt so that you can work toward resolving the problem rather than a symptom of the problem before it has a negative impact on your life.

2. Write down or talk about your guilt with a trusted friend, counselor or a professional coach.

3. Do something about what you are feeling guilty about rather than consuming yourself with guilt that is non-productive. If you’ve wronged someone, seek to make amends. Apologize to whomever you have mistreated.

4. Develop a written list of 10 affirmations to support the choices you’ve made, like “I am where I need to be”; “My children are being well cared for in my absence”; “I am spending money wisely and responsibly”.

5. Forgive yourself. Remind yourself that everybody makes mistakes and its part of being human.

Cick here for more resources, information and techniques for handling guilt.

Post your guilt confessions or your best strategies for overcoming your guilt by adding your comments below!! You could WIN a FREE coaching session with The Priority Pro!

Look around you….

Are there piles mounting, a growing to-do list, unresolved relationship issues, or cluttered cabinets, drawers and closets?

If so, tend to these before they accumulate. As they build up, they become increasingly overwhelming and time-intensive to eliminate or at least alleviate. It becomes harder to sort and de-clutter larger stacks and piles. Relationship issues tend to grow into more complicated problems when they are avoided rather than handled effectively and resolved.

Picture a plate that’s piled high with food to the point that it’s brimming over. Food is falling on the floor. Gravies and sauces are blending together to make tastes that are unpalatable. Your once enormous appetite is slowly fading to stomach pains at the thought of having to devour all this food.

This analogy is reticent of how you may be accumulating your work, issues and other activities.

Instead, focus on taking things off your plate by prioritizing and accomplishing tasks and delegating or outsourcing most others. Although you may never have a totally clean plate at the end of the day, week, month or year, by removing things from your plate you’re able to minimize the time and energy spent thinking about something or getting it done.

Too often, we allow ourselves to get distracted and off-task, especially when we have unpleasant, routine or boring tasks to complete. These tasks, like opening mail, responding to emails, filing, record-keeping, and more tend to keep piling up if not addressed in a timely manner. If you really must do these things your self (either because you have no one to delegate it to; have no budget to hire anyone; want to learn how to do it because it’s important for your professional development; or, for some other relevant reason) then, clearly define what it is you need to do. For example, rather than thinking “I need to prepare the spreadsheet”, rephrase it to “I need to gather the numbers from the other departments to input into the spreadsheet.” This clarity helps you focus on the task at-hand. Additionally, as in this example, understand how the numbers will be used, why it’s important and who will be viewing the data. Having a greater depth of understanding helps drive the importance of the different tasks on your plate vying for your time and energy. Understand what you have to gain by getting through each task, too.

Getting motivated and staying on task is important. It’s easier to get motivated to do a smaller task rather than a large task. You won’t need to set aside nearly as much time to complete smaller tasks either. The more often you do them, the easier they become because they become much more routine.

You may not accomplish everything on your plate today! However, if you more reasonably fill your plate rather than allowing things to pile on, you’ll be able to accomplish more of it without having things pile up and accumulate. Get motivated and stay on task!

Juggling is frequently used as a metaphor for balancing everything on your plate. Fact is, the act of juggling cannot continue endlessly and eventually either it stops or something comes crashing to the ground. A book that I enjoyed reading about this topic several years ago still sits on my bookshelf in my office because it offers various alternatives to juggling, all which are more practical and realistic than the juggling technique.

Did you know…

Forty-five minutes, two seconds. It’s the longest time Anthony Gatto, a professional juggler and the world-record holder since 1989, has kept five clubs in the air. Add one or two clubs, and he can’t juggle much more than a minute.

Gatto is a juggler extraordinaire. However, most of us are not. Gatto was noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the first to flash eight clubs and juggle seven torches, and for endurance records with seven clubs, eight rings, five clubs, seven balls and seven rings.

Like most of you reading this, I frequently have multiple projects in different phases of completion both in my business life and my personal life. I enjoy having the range of tasks to work on and choose between. However, sometimes it’s challenging because deadlines clash. There are competing priorities and conflicting demands!

Juggling is often used as a metaphor for multi-tasking but I think plate-spinning is better. With juggling you touch each item briefly before throwing it up again and the whole impression is of only just being in control. With plate spinning you spend time on each plate at the start and then work on any that are faltering to keep them going. An added bonus is that with plate spinning you can have someone help with the ongoing work. A particular technique that works in plate spinning and in life is to zoom-in and zoom-out. Zooming in to focus on completing a task and zooming out to focus on the big picture.

A really important part of the plate spinning metaphor is the idea of giving a plate a small stroke to keep it going rather than having to put a huge effort into all projects weekly.

Multitasking has repeatedly been proven as an ineffective strategy for juggling (or plate spinning) all the tasks on your plate. The problem with multi-tasking is that you can only engage part of your brain in any given task so when working on several tasks simultaneously, you’re not giving your brain the opportunity to give any one task the proper amount of it’s attention.

A funny thing happened the other day when I called my brother on his cell phone while he was at work. He was speaking on his business line to a vendor. He inadvertently answered the cell phone without realizing that he had done so because he was also on email and had a second phone call on hold. I hung up and waited for him to call back later. When he did, he explained that this happens all the time! He didn’t even realize that he had answered my call but happened to notice that he received a call from me. Fortunately, I figured out what was going on pretty quickly. More importantly, I wasn’t a customer! Can you imagine this similar scenario with a customer calling in and you not giving that customer your full attention?? (And, of course, I offered to help my brother better manage his tasks so that he’s not poorly multitasking!)

Clutter is the excess stuff in your life that takes up space on your table and countertops, in your closets, attics, basements, drawers, and filing cabinets, your hard drive, inbox and your to-do list. You expend energy moving it, rearranging it, cleaning around it, re-organizing it, and simply thinking about it. Clutter is a burden on your mind because you know it’s there and oftentimes you speak negatively to yourself because it’s there.

De-cluttering involves simplifying your home and office and surrounding yourself with only the things you love, need and want—eliminate everything else! Make a commitment to start eliminating clutter from your life and you'll see an immediate difference in the way you think and feel. Removing clutter allows for more space in your life, both in time and freedom. De-cluttering is an incredibly freeing experience because you're getting rid of all the things you don't need or want and don't have time for anyway.

Conquering clutter is an ongoing battle for most busy people. With life being so busy, piles accumulate, files seem to multiply, toys are overflowing from the toy box, and clothes are bursting from drawers and closets. Here are a few ideas to help you start eliminating clutter:

·   Sort through what you have and divide it into categories or piles.

·   Go through your (electronic and paper) files and discard old memos, reports, and articles that you've been saving “just in case.”

·   Make it a habit (for you and everyone else) to always put things back where they belong.

·   Do not bring junk mail into your home or office; get removed from as many mailing lists as possible. (Note: you can contact the American Direct Marketing Association, www.dmaconsumers.org/offmailinglist.html, to have them remove you from their lists for a nominal fee; you can contact the sender directly; and indicate that you don't want to be included on their mailing lists; or, you can indicate your preference for exclusion from future mailings when ordering a product/service, or filling out a warranty card, or making a donation)

·   Clip out and file the articles from magazines that interest you and recycle or discard the rest of the magazine.

·   Give away or sell unwanted toys and other items you (or your kids) are no longer interested in. (You know what they say about one person's trash being someone else's treasure!)

·   Load up a bag of clothes that don't fit, are out of style, or are just plain unflattering and take them to a local charity, shelter, or rummage sale.

·   Get rid of the little things, like clothes, furniture, and books, and it will be easier to get rid of the bigger things, such as an unfulfilling job or a relationship that really isn't right for you.

·   Assign a home to the things that remain.

·   Use bins, baskets or boxes and labels to store items and make them easily accessible.

·   If it seems like an overwhelming job to de-clutter, break it down into manageable parts. Do a room a day for a few days. Start with a hall closet. Start on the top shelf and do one shelf at a time so if you get interrupted and have to stop, you haven't made too big of a mess. Do a file drawer. Tackle your in-box. Just keep going one step at a time.

·   Once you've eliminated the clutter, prevent more from coming in.

You pay a high price for living with clutter in your life because it makes it hard for you to function at 100%; it keeps you stuck and keeps you busy looking for things rather than getting things done. Creating space contributes to feeling better physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Once you cut clutter you will feel lighter, think more clearly, be more organized and have more energy. You'll feel like there's less on your plate!

Conquer clutter by spending a half-hour to an hour each day for a week (or weekend) just clearing out stuff you no longer want or need. If possible, enlist the help and support of your family and work colleagues in this goal. Start small with one shelf or one closet and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment as you begin creating space in your life. Gain momentum and keep it going by preventing yourself from getting overwhelmed or quitting before you experience the results. Then, move on to the next area until you've gone through every room and space in your home and at work. By eliminating things you no longer need, you will spend remarkably less time looking for things and you will have the opportunity to reach your full potential. By organizing your space you will free up your creative energy and channel it into your work. You cannot be effective when your desk is piled high with papers, when your filing cabinets are hard to manage, and when you cannot find what you need.

One of my favorite techniques for clearing physical clutter is to start with boxes labeled: sell, give away, throw away, recycle/reuse, and keep. Quickly go through a filing cabinet, closet, or drawer and place items in the appropriate boxes. If you're really uncertain and afraid of discarding—create another box labeled with the contents and date. If items are not used within a year from the date indicated, reconsider discarding at that time. It's essential to shift your attitude to "it's okay to throw away" in order to conquer clutter.